Mastering Regular Expressions

This book will get you up to speed on the productivity secrets that will make your life easier: regular expressions. Well-crafted regular expressions can reduce hours of tedious labor to a 15-second solution. Now a standard feature in a wide range of languages and popular tools—including Perl, PHP, Java, Python, Ruby, MySQL, VB.NET, and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework)—regular expressions will allow you to code complex and subtle text processing that you never imagined could be automated.

Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, now includes material on PHP and its powerful regular expressions. This edition has been updated throughout to reflect advances in other languages including expanded in-depth coverage of Sun's java.util.regex, with special attention to the many differences between Java 1.4.2 and Java 1.5/1.6.

Topics include:

• A comparison of features among many languages and tools

• How a regular expression engine works

• Optimization (major savings available here!)

• Matching only what you want, not what you don't

• Sections and chapters on individual languages

Written in the lucid, entertaining tone that makes a complex topic become crystal clear to programmers, and filled with solutions to difficult real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, offers a wealth of information that you can put to immediate use to craft elegant, time-saving solutions to a wide range of issues.