Mastering regular expressions - Jeffrey E. F. Friedl

Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data.They have spread like wildfire in recent years, now offered as standard features inPerl, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, Python,Ruby, Tcl, MySQL, awk, Emacs, and many other popular tools and languages. Ifyou don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole newworld of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate thisbook's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all youneed to know about regular expressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener. In spitetheir wide availability, flexibility, and unparalleled power, regular expressions arefrequently underutilized. Regular expressions allow you to code complex and subtletext processing that you never imagined could be automated. Regular expressions cansave you time and aggravation. They can be used to craft elegant solutions to a widerange of problems. A command of regular expressions is an invaluable skill. Yet whatis power in the hands of an expert can be fraught with peril for the unwary.

Mastering Regular Expressions will help you navigate the minefield to becomingan expert. Once you've mastered regular expressions, they'll become an invaluablepart of your toolkit. You will wonder how you ever got by without them. MasteringRegular Expressions, Second Edition has been thoroughly updated to include allthe new features of Perl 5.8, as well as several other languages, including Java,VB.NET, C#, Python, JavaScript, Tcl, and Ruby. Written in the lucid, entertainingtone that made a complex, dry topic crystal-clear to thousands of programmers, andsprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering RegularExpressions offers a wealth information that you can put to immediate use. Topicsinclude:

• A comparison of features among different versions of many languagesand tools
• How the regular expression engine works
• Optimization (major savings available here!)
• Matching just what you want, but not what you don't want
• Sections and chapters on individual languages