Regular Expressions Cookbook (Paperback)

This O'Reilly Cookbook provides more than a hundred recipes to help programmers use regular expressions to manipulate text and crunch data. Every programmer needs a grasp of regular expressions, but their power doesn't come without problems--even seasoned users often have trouble tackling performance issues. With recipes for popular programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET, this book offers step-by-step solutions to scores of common tasks involving regular expressions. This cookbook will help you:

• Understand the basics of regular expressions through a concise tutorial
• Use regular expressions effectively in several programming and scripting languages
• Learn how to validate and format input
• Manage words, lines, special characters, and numerical values
• Find solutions for using regular expressions in URLs, paths, markup, and data exchange
• Learn the nuances of more advanced regex features
• Understand how regular expression APIs differ from language to language
• Write better regular expressions for custom needs

Whether you're a novice or an experienced user, Regular Expressions Cookbook will help deepen your understanding of this tool. You'll learn powerful new tricks, avoid language-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of proven solutions to difficult, real-world problems.