You should read this book if you regularly work with text on a computer, whether that’s searching through a pile of documents, manipulating text in a text editor, or developing software that needs to search through or manipulate text. Regular expressions are an excellent tool for the job. Regular Expressions Cookbook teaches you everything you need to know about regular expressions. You don’t need any prior experience whatsoever, because we explain even the most basic aspects of regular expressions.
If you do have experience with regular expressions, you’ll find a wealth of detail that other books and online articles often gloss over. If you’ve ever been stumped by a regex that works in one application but not another, you’ll find this book’s detailed and equal coverage of seven of the world’s most popular regular expression flavors very valuable. We organized the whole book as a cookbook, so you can jump right to the topics you want to read up on. If you read the book cover to cover, you’ll become a world-class chef of regular expressions.
This book teaches you everything you need to know about regular expressions and then some, regardless of whether you are a programmer. If you want to use regular expressions with a text editor, search tool, or any application with an input box labeled “regex,” you can read this book with no programming experience at all. Most of the recipes in this book have solutions purely based on one or more regular expressions.
If you are a programmer, Chapter 3 provides all the information you need to implement regular expressions in your source code. This chapter assumes you’re familiar with the basic language features of the programming language of your choice, but it does not assume you have ever used a regular expression in your source code.
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