Learning Regular Expressions, First Edition

Introduction

Regular expressions and the regular expression language have been around for many years. Regular expression experts have long been armed with an incredibly powerful tool, one that can be used to perform all sorts of powerful text processing and manipulation in just about every language and on every platform.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that for too long, regular expressions have been the exclusive property of only the most tech savvy. Most of us do not fully understand what regular expressions do and what problems they solve. And those who have braved them find regular expression syntax to be unintuitive, and even convoluted at times. That’s sad, because the truth is that regular expressions are nowhere near as complex ...