Introducing Regular Expressions: Unraveling Regular Expressions, Step-by-Step

Book Description If you’re a programmer new to regular expressions, this easy-to-follow guide is a great place to start. You’ll learn the fundamentals step-by-step with the help of numerous examples, discovering first-hand how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns.
Regular expressions are an essential part of a programmer’s toolkit, available in various Unix utlilities as well as programming languages such as Perl, Java, jаvascript, and C#. When you’ve finished this book, you’ll be familiar with the most commonly used syntax in regular expressions, and you’ll understand how using them will save you considerable time.

• Discover what regular expressions are and how they work
• Learn many of the differences between regular expressions used with command-line tools and in various programming languages
• Apply simple methods for finding patterns in text, including digits, letters, Unicode characters, and string literals
• Learn how to use zero-width assertions and lookarounds
• Work with groups, backreferences, character classes, and quantifiers
• Use regular expressions to mark up plain text with HTML5

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Content

1. What Is a Regular Expression?
2. Simple Pattern Matching
3. Boundaries
4. Alternation, Groups, and Backreferences
5. Character Classes
6. Matching Unicode and Other Characters
7. Quantifiers
8. Lookarounds
9. Marking Up a Document with HTML
10. The End of the Beginning