Table Of Content• Table of Contents
• Reviews
• Reader Reviews
• Errata
• Academic
Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition
By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pub Date: July 2002
ISBN: 0-596-00289-0
Pages: 484
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, Java, VB.NET and C#
(and any language using the .NET Framework),
PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl, MySQL, awk, and Emacs. 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.
• Table of Contents
• Reviews
• Reader Reviews
• Errata
• Academic
Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition
By Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
Publisher: O'Reilly
Pub Date: July 2002
ISBN: 0-596-00289-0
Pages: 484
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
The Need for This Book
Intended Audience
How to Read This Book
Organization
Typographical Conventions
Exercises
Links, Code, Errata, and Contacts
Personal Comments and Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Introduction to Regular Expressions
Section 1.1. Solving Real Problems
Section 1.2. Regular Expressions as a Language
Section 1.3. The Regular-Expression Frame of Mind
Section 1.4. Egrep Metacharacters
Section 1.5. Expanding the Foundation
Section 1.6. Personal Glimpses
Section 1.7. Quiz Answer
Chapter 2. Extended Introductory Examples
Section 2.1. About the Examples
Section 2.2. Matching Text with Regular Expressions
Section 2.3. Modifying Text with Regular Expressions
Section 2.4. Quiz Answers
Chapter 3. Overview of Regular Expression Features and Flavors
Section 3.1. A Casual Stroll Across the Regex Landscape
Section 3.2. Care and Handling of Regular Expressions
Section 3.3. Strings, Character Encodings, and Modes
Section 3.4. Common Metacharacters and Features
Section 3.5. Guide to the Advanced Chapters
Chapter 4. The Mechanics of Expression Processing
Section 4.1. Start Your Engines!
Section 4.2. Match Basics
Section 4.3. Regex-Directed Versus Text-Directed
Section 4.4. Backtracking
Section 4.5. More About Greediness and Backtracking
Section 4.6. NFA, DFA, and POSIX
Section 4.7. Summary
Section 4.8. Quiz Answers
Chapter 5. Practical Regex Techniques
Section 5.1. Regex Balancing Act
Section 5.2. A Few Short Examples
Section 5.3. HTML-Related Examples
Section 5.4. Extended Examples
Chapter 6. Crafting an Efficient Expression
Section 6.1. A Sobering Example
Section 6.2. A Global View of Backtracking
Section 6.3. Benchmarking
Section 6.4. Common Optimizations
Section 6.5. Techniques for Faster Expressions
Section 6.6. Unrolling the Loop
Section 6.7. The Freeflowing Regex
Section 6.8. In Summary: Think!
Section 6.9. Quize Answers
Chapter 7. Perl
Section 7.1. Regular Expressions as a Language Component
Section 7.2. Perl's Regex Flavor
Section 7.3. Regex-Related Perlisms
Section 7.4. The qr/···/ Operator and Regex Objects
Section 7.5. The Match Operator
Section 7.6. The Substitution Operator
Section 7.7. The Split Operator
Section 7.8. Fun with Perl Enhancements
Section 7.9. Perl Efficiency Issues
Section 7.10. Final Comments
Chapter 8. Java
Section 8.1. Judging a Regex Package
Section 8.2. Object Models
Section 8.3. Packages, Packages, Packages
Section 8.4. Sun's Regex Package
Section 8.5. A Quick Look at Jakarta-ORO
Chapter 9. .NET
Section 9.1. .NET's Regex Flavor
Section 9.2. Using .NET Regular Expressions
Section 9.3. Core Object Details
Section 9.4. Static "Convenience" Functions
Section 9.5. Support Functions
Section 9.6. Advanced .NET
About the Author
Colophon
Mastering Regular Expressions, Second Edition
by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
Copyright © 2002, 1997 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway
North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
O'Reilly & Associates books may be purchased for educational,
business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for
most titles (safari.oreilly.com). For more information contact our
corporate/institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or
[email protected].
Editor: Andy Oram
Production Editor: Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
Cover Designer: Edie Freedman
Printing History:
January 1997: First Edition.
July 2002: Second Edition.
Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O'Reilly logo
are registered trademarks of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Many of the
designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their
products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in
this book, and O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. was aware of a trademark
claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. The
association between the image of owls and the topic of regular
expressions is a trademark of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book,
the publisher and the author assume no responsibility for errors or
omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information
contained herein.
Dedication
For putting up with me.
And for the years I worked on this book, for putting
up without me.
Preface
This book is about a powerful tool called "regular expressions". It teaches
you how to use regular expressions to solve problems and get the most
out of tools and languages that provide them. Most documentation that
mentions regular expressions doesn't even begin to hint at their power,
but this book is about mastering regular expressions.
Regular expressions are available in many types of tools (editors, word
processors, system tools, database engines, and such), but their power
is most fully exposed when available as part of a programming language.
Examples include Java and JScript, Visual Basic and VBScript,
JavaScript and ECMAScript, C, C++, C#, elisp, Perl, Python, Tcl, Ruby,
PHP, sed, and awk. In fact, regular expressions are the very heart of
many programs written in some of these languages.
There's a good reason that regular expressions are found in so many
diverse languages and applications: they are extremely powerful. At a
low level, a regular expression describes a chunk of text. You might use it
to verify a user's input, or perhaps to sift through large amounts of data.
On a higher level, regular expressions allow you to master your data.
Control it. Put it to work for you. To master regular expressions is to
master your data.
The Need for This Book
I finished the first edition of this book in late 1996, and wrote it simply
because there was a need. Good documentation on regular expressions
just wasn't available, so most of their power went untapped. Regular-
expression documentation was available, but it centered on the "low-level
view." It seemed to me that they were analogous to showing someone
the alphabet and expecting them to learn to speak.
Why I've Written the Second Edition
In the five and a half years since the first edition of this book was
published, the world of regular expressions expanded considerably. The
regular expressions of almost every tool and language became more
powerful and expressive. Perl, Python, Tcl, Java, and Visual Basic all got
new regular-expression backends. New languages with regular
expression support, like Ruby, PHP, and C#, were developed and
became popular. During all this time, the basic core of the bookhow to
truly understand regular expressions and how to get the most from them
maintained as important and relevant as ever.
Gradually, the first edition started to show its age. It needed updating to
reflect the new languages and features, as well as the expanding role
that regular expressions play in today's Internet world. When I decided to
update the first edition, it was with a promise to my wife that it would take
no more than three months. Two years later, luckily still married, almost
the entire book has been rewritten from scratch. It's good, though, that it
took so long, for it brought me into 2002, a particularly active year for
regular expressions. In early 2002, both Java 1.4 (with
java.util.regex) and Microsoft's .NET were released, and Perl 5.8
was released that summer. They are all covered fully in this book.
Intended Audience
This book will interest anyone who has an opportunity to use regular
expressions. If you don't yet understand the power that regular
expressions can provide, you should benefit greatly as a whole new
world is opened up to you. This book should expand your understanding,
even if you consider yourself an accomplished regular-expression expert.
After the first edition, it wasn't uncommon for me to receive an email that
started "I thought I knew regular expressions until I read Mastering
Regular Expressions. Now I do."
Programmers working on text-related tasks, such as web programming,
will find an absolute gold mine of detail, hints, tips, and understanding
that can be put to immediate use. The detail and thoroughness is simply
not found anywhere else.
Regular expressions are an ideaone that is implemented in various ways
by various utilities (many, many more than are specifically presented in
this book). If you master the general concept of regular expressions, it's a
short step to mastering a particular implementation. This book
concentrates on that idea, so most of the knowledge presented here
transcends the utilities and languages used to present the examples.
