Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
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Description
Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data. They are now standard features in a wide range of languages and popular tools, including Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, and MySQL. If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If show more you think you know all you need to know about regularexpressions, this book is a stunning e show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Regular expressions, unless you’re a mathematician or a computer scientist, are fairly irregular things. What started as ways to write patterns to match strings of characters has grown out of control, especially with regexes (as they’re called) being a fundamental part of the Perl programming language.
Friedl presents here the most comprehensive covering of regexes that can possibly be put in bound book form. The first six chapters will give you everything you need to learn and hopefully understand regexes, while the latter chapters give you insight into language/framework-specific implementations of them (including Perl, Java, PHP and .NET).
Having dealt with regexes a lot in the past, this book did not wow or amaze me. It did, show more however, provide some useful tips for future regex writing. If you’re a regex newb, it would be greatly useful, especially if you’re planning on writing a lot of regexes. If you’re a seasoned veteran, it may be beneficial to skim this book, but by no means skip it, unless your name happens to be Jeffrey Friedl.
My only complaint with this book is that most of the .NET examples are in the abomination of a “programming language” called Visual Basic. Why such a language even still exists in beyond me. However, since VB is part of .NET, most of the examples can be trivially translated into more meaningful languages, such as C#.
I would highly recommend this book for anybody who dedicates any reasonable amount of time towards constructing regular expressions, as well as to anybody who spends an inordinate amount of time writing methods/functions/subroutines to handle complex (that is, more than “this string equals this string”) string matching. Regular expressions will save you countless hours, since somebody’s done all that heavy lifting for you already! show less
Friedl presents here the most comprehensive covering of regexes that can possibly be put in bound book form. The first six chapters will give you everything you need to learn and hopefully understand regexes, while the latter chapters give you insight into language/framework-specific implementations of them (including Perl, Java, PHP and .NET).
Having dealt with regexes a lot in the past, this book did not wow or amaze me. It did, show more however, provide some useful tips for future regex writing. If you’re a regex newb, it would be greatly useful, especially if you’re planning on writing a lot of regexes. If you’re a seasoned veteran, it may be beneficial to skim this book, but by no means skip it, unless your name happens to be Jeffrey Friedl.
My only complaint with this book is that most of the .NET examples are in the abomination of a “programming language” called Visual Basic. Why such a language even still exists in beyond me. However, since VB is part of .NET, most of the examples can be trivially translated into more meaningful languages, such as C#.
I would highly recommend this book for anybody who dedicates any reasonable amount of time towards constructing regular expressions, as well as to anybody who spends an inordinate amount of time writing methods/functions/subroutines to handle complex (that is, more than “this string equals this string”) string matching. Regular expressions will save you countless hours, since somebody’s done all that heavy lifting for you already! show less
Essential, although mind-bending.
An in-depth look at how regular expressions work and how to create regular expressions for some popular languages.
Good book, and thorough.
THE reference for regular expressions!
Good book, and thorough.
Another one that I haven't finished, but which I have moved to reference.
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ThingScore 100
"The author is clearly passionate about regexes, and wants you to squeeze the most out of every regex you write"; the third edition is "[i]ndispensable for text processing wizards and regex newcomers alike. 9/10"
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Author Information
2 Works 1,760 Members
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Mastering Regular Expressions
- Original title
- Mastering Regular Expressions
- Original publication date
- 1997-01 (1st edition) (1st edition); 2002-07 (2nd edition) (2nd edition); 2006-08 (3rd edition) (3rd edition)
- Dedication
- FOR 文枝 Fumie
For putting up with me.
And for the years I worked on this book,
for putting up without me. - First words
- Here's the scenario: your boss in the documentation department wants a tool to check for doubled words (such as "this this"), a common problem with documents subject to heavy editing.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Well, I better stop before I get carried away. The sum of it all is that I definitely do not think Perl is the ideal regex-wielding language.
But it is very close.
Classifications
- Genres
- Technology, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 005.72 — Computer science, information & general works Computer science, knowledge & systems Artificial Intelligence/Virtual Reality Data in computer systems Preparation and Representation
- LCC
- QA76.9 .T48 .F75 — Science Mathematics Mathematics Instruments and machines Calculating machines Electronic computers. Computer science
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 1,759
- Popularity
- 12,496
- Reviews
- 9
- Rating
- (4.25)
- Languages
- 6 — English, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 21
- UPCs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1