Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes

by Forta, Ben

• ISBN13: 9780672325663
• ISBN10: 0672325667
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-02-24
• Publisher: Sams Publishing

Summary

RegEx is supported in all major development environments (for use in editing and working with code) and will thus appeal to anyone using these tools. In addition, every JavaScript developer should be using RegEx, but most don't as it has never been taught to them properly before. Developers using ASP, C#, ColdFusion, Java JSP, PHP, Perl, Python, and more can (and should) be using RegEx, and so every one of them is a potential reader too. The reader of this book will learn how to: Match characters sets Match repeating characters (using minimums and maximums if needed) Match (or ignore) based on case Build sub-expressions Use all of the special characters Work with excape sequences Use POSIX classes to simplify complex expressions Use back-references Use look-behind operators Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutesis a tutorial book organized into a series of easy-to-follow 10-minute lessons. These well targeted lessons teach you in 10 minutes what other books might take hundreds of pages to cover. Instead of dwelling on syntax, terminology, and arcane examples and scenarios, this book takes a very hands-on approach to solving the needs of the majority of RegEx users who simply need to manipulate data.

Author Biography

Ben Forta is Macromedia Inc.'s Senior Technical Evangelist and has more than two decades of experience in the computer industry in product development, support, training, and marketing. Ben is the author of the popular Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes (in this same series), ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit, its sequel Advanced ColdFusion Application Development, as well as books on JavaServer Pages, Windows development, mobile computing, and other topics. More than one-quarter million Ben Forta books have been printed in more than a dozen languages worldwide. He writes regular columns on Internet and application development topics and spends a considerable amount of time lecturing and speaking on application development worldwide. Ben welcomes your email at [e-mail] and invites you to visit his Web site at http://www.forta.com/.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Introducing Regular Expressions

Understanding the Need

How Regular Expressions Are Used

So What Exactly Is a Regular Expression? Using Regular Expressions

Before You Get Started

Summary

Matching-Single Characters

Matching Literal Text

Matching Any Characters

Matching Special Characters

Summary

Matching Sets of Characters

Matching One of Several Characters

Using Character Set Ranges

"Anything But" Matching

Summary

Using Metacharacters

Escaping Revisited

Matching Whitespace Characters

Matching Specific Character Types

Using POSIX Character Classes

Summary

Repeating Matches

How Many Matches? Using Intervals

Preventing Over Matching

Summary

Position Matching

Using Boundaries

Using Word Boundaries

Defining String Boundaries

Summary

Using Subexpressions

Understanding Subexpressions

Grouping with Subexpressions

Nesting Subexpressions

Summary

Using Backreferences

Understanding Backreferences

Matching with Backreferences

Performing Replace Operations

Summary

Looking Ahead and Behind

Introducing Lookaround

Looking Ahead

Looking Behind

Combining Lookahead and Lookbehind

Negating Lookaround

Summary

Embedding Conditions

Why Embed Conditions? Using Conditions

Summary

Regular Expressions in Popular Applications and Languages grep

JavaScript

Macromedia ColdFusion

Macromedia Dreamweaver

Macromedia HomeSite (and ColdFusion Studio)

Microsoft ASP

Microsoft ASP.NET

Microsoft C#

Microsoft .NET

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. MySQL. Perl. PHP. Sun Java

Regular Expression Solutions to Common Problems

North American Phone Numbers

U.S. ZIP Codes

Canadian Postal Codes

United Kingdom Postcodes

U.S. Social Security Numbers

IP Addresses

URLs

Complete URLs

Email Addresses

HTML Comments

JavaScript Comments

Credit Card Numbers

Summary

The Regular Expression Tester

Understanding the Regular Expression Tester Application

Obtaining a Copy of the Application

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