This cookbook provides more than 100 recipes to help you crunch data and manipulate text with regular expressions. Every programmer can find uses for regular expressions, but their power doesn't come worry-free. Even seasoned users often suffer from poor performance, false positives, false negatives, or perplexing bugs. Regular Expressions Cookbook offers step-by-step instructions for some of the most common tasks involving this tool, with recipes for C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET. With this book, you will:

• 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 expressions' APIs, syntax, and behavior 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 knowledge of this unique and irreplaceable 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.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

Excellent book - 2009-08-24
Reviewer Rating:
This book is very well written and the author definitely knows the subject matter.

The book has a great format: after a brief tutorial, it is organized by prolem solution.
Each problem/solution is further organized by dialect (javascript, .net, perl, etc.) so
you can quickly zero in on what you are looking for.

Each prolem/solution has the source code and explanation so you can adapt the code if needed.

Regular Expressions are extremely valuable, but they are also prone to misuse resulting in colossal headaches.
This book will help you avoid those headaches.

Thank you and bravo to Steven Levithan and Jan Goyvaerts - 2009-09-21
Reviewer Rating:
I am not a great regular expressions expert rather a beginner in some ways but this book is definitely well organized and is one of the best I have ever seen for finding solutions in using regular expressions with a good well organized library of formulas in several programming and scripting languages as well as some pretty advance topics this book has something that could benefit everyone using it.
I don't have enough stars to accurately give toward this book.
Thank you and bravo to Steven Levithan and Jan Goyvaerts

Learn how to format input, manage lines, find solutions for common markups and paths, and more - 2009-10-13
Reviewer Rating:
Jan Goyvaerts' and Steven Levithan's REGULAR EXPRESSIONS COOKBOOK provides over 100 recipes to help blend data and text with regular expressions, offering programmers and software development collections a powerful set of step-by-step instructions for using C#, Java, Perl, Python and VB.Net, among others. Learn how to format input, manage lines, find solutions for common markups and paths, and more in this advanced programmer's cookbook of basics.

For Only $30 It'll Pay For Itself In One Use - 2009-10-11
Reviewer Rating:
This is the kind of book one doesn't actually read (unless you're a masochist ;-), but is essential to have around. Let's face it, very few of us are good with regular expressions. If you aren't using them every day (which most of us aren't) they are just some kind of black-magic stuff we need to do every now and then.

From what I've seen the examples and explanations are clearly written, and the fact that they show - and explain - solutions for Perl, .NET, Java, JavaScript, Python and Ruby makes this book too good to pass up.

Confusing organization; too specific or too general - 2009-09-14
Reviewer Rating:
I'm doing more and more regular expression so thought this was a book I had to have especially considering it's an O'Reiily. However, I've found it's organization confusing. The recipes are either too general or too specific to be of any use. My approach to problem solving is that for every problem there is already a solution. You just need to find it, plug in your data, and turn the crank. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to use this book.

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