Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes (Sams Teach Yourself ... in 10 Minutes)

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 Minutes is 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.

Presenting a quick approach for learning Regular Expressions, this text provides useful, complete examples and usage notes for many relevant tasks and implementations. It includes test code in numerous languages so that the examples can be applied and used immediately.

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 ben@forta.com and invites you to visit his Web site at http://www.forta.com/.

Introduction.

1. Introducing Regular Expressions.

2. Matching—Single Characters.

3. Matching Sets of Characters.

4. Using Metacharacters.

5. Repeating Matches.

6. Position Matching.

7. Using Subexpressions.

8. Using Backreferences.

9. Looking Ahead and Behind.

10. Embedding Conditions.

Appendix A: Regular Expressions in Popular Applications and Languages.

Appendix B: Regular Expression Solutions to Common Problems.

Appendix C: The Regular Expression Tester.