9REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Programming tools and techniques survive and spread in a chaotic, evolutionary way. It’s not always the pretty or brilliant ones that win but rather the ones that function well enough within the right niche or that happen to be integrated with another successful piece of technology.
In this chapter, I will discuss one such tool, regular expressions. Regular expressions are a way to describe patterns in string data. They form a small, separate language that is part of JavaScript and many other languages and systems.
Regular expressions are both terribly awkward and extremely useful. Their syntax is cryptic, and the programming interface JavaScript provides for them is clumsy. But they are a powerful tool for inspecting and ...
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