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For 2023 (and 2024 ...) - we are now fully retired from IT training.
We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

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I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))

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Perl module P212
More on Character Strings
Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module P212. This topic is presented on public courses Perl Programming, Perl bootcamp, Learning to program in Perl, Perl Programming

a.k.a. "Regular Expressions, part 2". How to match a string to a pattern, how to extract information from a match, how to repeat matches, to substitute one string of text for another, and how to translate on a character by character basis.

Related technical and longer articles
Analysing incoming data lines
Pattern Matching - a primer on regular Expressions

Articles and tips on this subjectupdated
4452Binary data handling - Python and Perl
Handling binary data has become a somewhat rarer requirement over tiem, but that doensn't mean the need has gone away - and on last week's Python course, my delegates had a requirement to read data in this format. First and foremost with binary data, you need to understand what you're looking to read ...
2015-03-09
 
3927First match or all matches? Perl Regular Expressions
If you match a string to a regular expression, there are often lots of ways it can match. And if you're just saying "does this match", that's fair enough ... but if you're wanting to extract the matched data, you need to give it more thought. A Perl match to /-?\d+\.\d+/ in an if statement will give ...
2012-11-24
 
3707Converting codons via Amino Acids to Proteins in Perl
DNA is the code of life - a double helix, comprising just four different basic codon elements:   • Adenine (A)   • Thymine (T)   • Guanine (G)   • Cytosine (c) and a huge amount of work has gone into analysing these for the genes right across ...
2012-04-28
 
3650Possessive Regular Expression Matching - Perl, Objective C and some other languages
"I'm looking to spend between £200,000 and £225,000 on a new home" you say to the salesman and - guess what - you're offered something much nearer £225,000 that £200,000. With Regular Expression matching, you can ask the question "do we have a match", and that returns a Yes / ...
2012-03-12
 
3630Serialsing and unserialising data for storage and transfer in Perl
If you want to save a series of strings to a file, or pass them over a network connection, you'll need to delimit them - add in a special character so that the receiving / reading program will know where one piece of data ends and the next starts. The problem comes if the chosen special character may ...
2012-03-10
 
3546The difference between dot (a.k.a. full stop, period) and comma in Perl
If (Perl) I write   $x = "12";   $y = "25";   print $x,$y;   print $x.$y;   print "\n"; Then I'll get output   12251225 In other words - the output is the same. So is there a difference? Yes - there's a huge difference. $x.$y - using the ...
2011-12-17
 
3411Single and double quotes strings in Perl - what is the difference?
In Perl, there's usually more than one way of doing it ... If you're writing a string of text into your program, your first possibility is to use single quotes - in which case you're writing a literal string with everything between the single quote chartacters included exactly in the string. And your ...
2011-08-30
 
3332DNA to Amino Acid - a sample Perl script
A really rewarding course this week - Perl programming, for a dozen bright delegates in the bioinformatics field - the people who have defined the human code as billions of C A T and Gs and are then fuzzy matching against that human code to help in medical research. I hope I am forgiven for that simplistic ...
2011-06-24
 
3322How much has Perl (and other languages) changed?
How much has Perl code mover forward over the years? A lot, and not a lot. To some extend, programming languages are the eye of the storm of technology - and that's because people who invest in code want it to be good for many years, so the same tools are used for several generations of products, ...
2011-06-10
 
3100Looking ahead and behind in Regular Expressions - double matching
Look-ahead and look-behind are a way of "double matching" in a regular expression. If you're at a certain point in the match and you think "the next bit should conform to xxx and at the same time it should conform to yyy" then you can describe xxx via a look-ahead, and follow that with matching yyy ...
2010-12-24
 
3059Object Orientation in an hour and other Perl Lectures
I enjoy the occasional course that's different in its design and specification, and yesterday was one of those - more lectures that training, on intermediate and advanced Perl, for a group of eight delegates who were all well experienced at PHP, but Perl "dabblers" to this point. During the day, we ...
2010-12-04
 
2993Arrays v Lists - what is the difference, why use one or the other
If you want a program to run quickly through a data set (that's the sort of thing you'll be doing in heavy scientific work), you'll want the data loaded into successive memory locations - but that means that you have to know how much space to allocate before you set the data up. Otherwise, you'll find ...
2010-10-10
 
2874Unpacking a Perl string into a list
In Perl, you can extract data from a string in a lot of different ways. You can split the string if you want to use a uniform separator, you can use a regular expression if you want to grab out bits that match a pattern, and you can use substr to extract data based on specific character positions. Which ...
2010-07-31
 
2877Further more advanced Perl examples
I've uploaded a further batch of new examples (that makes around 40 in total!) from the private Perl course that I ran from Wednesday through Saturday last week - many of them adding a new twist on to previous examples. If you read a comment below and thing "that's what I'm looking for an example of", ...
2010-07-30
(longer)
2834Teaching examples in Perl - third and final part
Three part article ... this is part 3. Jump back to part [1] [2] Following on from two earlier posts, here is the final third of the new examples that I wrote during last week's Perl course, and to which I have added extra documentation over the last couple of days. P212 More on Character Strings "Does ...
2010-06-27
(longer)
2657Want to do a big batch edit? Nothing beats Perl!
I still love Perl ... Wanting to convert a file of lines like this:   <img src=rp_153_track.jpg><br><br> into lines like this:   rp_153_track.jpg <img src=rp_153_track.jpg><br><br> The code is as simple as:   /=(.*?)>/;   print "$1 $_"; And ...
2010-06-23
 
2801Binary data handling with unpack in Perl
During today's Perl course, I was asked to provide an example of the unpack function for extracting multiple values from a piece of data - typically binary data extracted from a file into a scalar variable. Dorothy-2:de$ perl imgsize sd*.gif sd1.gif is GIF, 89a, 450 by 250 sd2.gif is GIF, 89a, 250 by ...
2010-06-10
 
586Perl Regular Expressions - finding the position and length of the match
If you want to find the position of a match in an incoming string, simply check the length of $` (That's $PREMATCH if you've chosen to use English;) to check where it starts, and add the length of $& (that's $MATCH) to find where it ends. Lets say I want to find all the URLs referred to in a web ...
2009-11-29
 
2379Making variables persistant, pretending a database is a variable and other Perl tricks
Have a look at this Perl program: use fyle; tie $counter,"fyle";   $counter = $counter + 1; print ("This is access no. $counter\n"); Apart from the rather curious module loaded at the top, this seems to take an undefined variable, set it to one, and print it out. What a - err - pointless (!) ...
2009-08-28
 
2230Running a piece of code is like drinking a pint of beer
Q: What is the effect when I drink a pint of beer? A: I get slightly tipsy. But that's too simplistic! A: The brewery has some more money A: There's a glass to wash up A: I need the loo! Running a piece of code is like drinking a pint of beer - as well as a headline result, you get extra variables ...
2009-06-12
 
928C++ and Perl - why did they do it THAT way?
"Why did [they] do it THAT way?". It's a question often asked by the brighter and more perspective delegates on courses concerning some features of a language that I'm teaching them. And the answer "because they did" is a poor one. It's like saying to a child "because I said so" rather than looking ...
2009-01-01
 
1947Perl substitute - the e modifier
Here's a graphic illustration of the use of the "e" for "execute" modifier used on the end of substitute operation in Perl. The "s" for substitute allows you to replace a matched pattern with a STRING in which you can use special references like \1 or $1 for the first matched substring. If you want ...
2008-12-16
 
737Coloured text in a terminal from Perl
If you're looking to do something in Perl and the back of your mind tells you that, surely, someone's done this before then there are two things to note: • Someone probably HAS and • It's probably available on the CPAN or as a built in module. Thus when I was asked the question "How do I get ...
2008-12-09
 
1735Finding words and work boundaries (MySQL, Perl, PHP)
If you're searching for the word "mile", you probably don't want the page that tells you that Sally Smiled at Harry. But you may want to find a Milestone, even if it is within quotes. Regular Expressions are your friends! In Perl style regular expressions (which also work in Python, and in PHP with ...
2008-08-03
 
1727Equality and looks like tests - Perl
Whenever you do an equality check in a Perl program, you must think whether you're checking if two numbers are equal, if two test strings are equal, or if a string looks like a pattern. And you write different code in each case: Checking numbers: If ($stuff == 6) { ... Tests whether $stuff contains ...
2008-07-29
 
583Remember to process blank lines
I've got a Perl program that processes a data file 200 lines long. 15 of the lines are comments that start with a # (I test for those using ($line =~ /^#/), and 181 of the lines contain real data - in other words they start with a character that's not a # - my regular expression match reads ($line =~ ...
2008-06-11
 
1510Handling Binary data (.gif file example) in Perl
Perl is very good for handling binary data - it can do things you can't do with other utilities and scripting languages, and things that are very much harder to do in C - that's because C's strings are null terminated and in the case on binary strings, there may be an embedded null anywhere. Finding ...
2008-01-19
 
1336Ignore case in Regular Expression
Do you want to ignore case in a regular expression? There are a variety of ways of doing it ... depending on the language you're writing. Here are some hints: /abcd/i Perl - an i after the regular expression eregi PHP - use eregi rather than ereg re.I or re.IGNORECASE Python - extra parameters ...
2007-09-07
 
1305Regular expressions made easy - building from components
There seems to be a certain macho desire in many programmer's minds to write a single complicated regular expression to match against an input line, ignorning the structured approach that everyone accepts quite cheerfully in almost every other case. Have a look at this Python line: wholeline = r"\d\d-...-\d\d\d\d\s+(\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d.\d\d),\s+(-?\d+\.\d+),\s+(-?\d+\.\d+),(-?\d+\.\d+),\s+(-?\d+\.\d+),(-?\d+\.\d+),\s+(-?\d+\.\d+)" Impressive, ...
2007-08-16
 
1251Substitute operator / modifiers in Perl
Perl's substitute operator lets you replace a Regular Expression with another string within a target string. For example $hello = "Grating"; $hello =~ s/a/ee/; print "$hello\n"; Will turn Grating into Greeting within the $hello variable. You'll note that you can use almost any special character in ...
2007-07-06
 
1230Commenting a Perl Regular Expression
The x modifier on the end of a Perl regular expression causes all spaces in the regular expression to be treated as comments (rather than matching exactly). This means that you can lay out your regular expressions much more cleanly. And wherever you're allowed white space, you can add comments from ...
2007-06-13
 
1222Perl, the substitute operator s
In Perl, the s (or substitute) operator allows you to match a regular expression and replace the part of your incoming string that matched with another string. Your incoming string should be specified to the left of an =~ operator and is changed in situ. For example: $sample = "The cat sat on the ...
2007-06-08
 
943Matching within multiline strings, and ignoring case in regular expressions
Regular Expressions are powerful matching tools and you can specify almost anything within them. But there are certain facilities that are naturally applied to the regular expression as a whole rather than to parts of the match, and there are specified in a different way in each language / implementation. For ...
2006-11-26
 
453Commenting Perl regular expressions
Do you sometimes find Perl regular expressions hard to follow? If you do, remember that you can use the "x" modifier which allows you to space them out; with the "x" modifier, white spaces in the regular expression are ignored. You can go further; once you've specified the "x" modifier, you can ...
2006-06-05
 
Examples from our training material
3to3   translate a DNA 3-character codon to an amino acid
bincopi   Read and analyse binary .gif files
bindemo   Printing out and reading in binary numbers
cats2   Sample answer 2
catshow   Sample answer 1
cstr   Defining Strings
emma_hunter   Match and Capture - email address
emre   KISS - keep it simple - regular expression
favex.pl   Postcode, Zipcode, credit card no. etc - regular expression matches
filler   Using Regular Expressions to "mailmerge"
getlinks   Find all href links from a page
glomatch   Use of "g" modifier
greedyvglobal.pl   Greedy matches v Global matches
holiday   Packing and unpacking binary data
html1   Matching HTML - a greedy match doesn't work
html2   Sparse matching, looking for an HTML tag
html3   Global matching in a scalar context
html4   Global matching in a list context
itsperl   Serialise and unserialise strings
letters   Look for word starting and ending with same letter
murl   Regular expression with comments
n2   Capturing groups into $1 and $2
n3   Capturing groups into a list
n4   Special variables $' $& and $`
n5   $PREMATCH, $MATCH and $POSTMATCH
name   Match and substitute (long winded way!)
name2   Match and substitute - (example that fails)
name3   Match and substitute executed block
names   Regular expression match - revision
newsub   Examples of the =~ s for substitute operator
ogado   Anagrams of First Great Western served stations
packet   pack and unpack
pcrd   Modifiers im matching
pcv1   Postcode extractor - mark 1
pcv2   Postcode extractor Mk2 - save into named variables
pcv3   Postcode, Mk3 - extract multiple postcodes
phone   Substitution using back reference
pusher   Single v global match and alternatives
pwline   Character by character translation with tr
pwline2   using tr to change multiple characters; also c and s switches
reg   Stepping through regular expressions
regextra   Splitting up a URL via a regex - sample exercise answer
rogues   Using tr to find invalid characters in a string
sedm   Substitue operator
slurpex   matching lines - whole file at a time
sting   different ways of defining a string
stuff   storing a compiled regular expression - qr
tophat   Hashes, Regular Expressions, Topicalisation ... end-of-course example
totext   Converting < > and & to web standard sequences
trandy   tr (or y) and its modifiers
yem   Perl regular expression - information returned
ystwyth.pl   binary data handling - examine a .gif file
Pictures
Yes!
Background information
Some modules are available for download as a sample of our material or under an Open Training Notes License for free download from [here].
Topics covered in this module
Summary to date.
Extracting information from a match.
$1, $2, etc.
Assign to a list.
$`, $& and $Õ.
More about regular expressions.
What else can I put in regular expressions?.
More brackets.
Match modifiers.
Global v Greedy.
Alternative delimiters.
Some favourite regular expressions.
To match an email address.
To match a UK Postcode.
To match an American Zip code.
To match a date (UK Style).
To match a time.
To match a complete URL for a web page.
To match a Visa number.
To match a Mastercard number.
To match a UK Phone number.
To match a UK car registration plate.
To match a UK national insurance number.
To match a book's ISBN number.
Substitutions.
Substitute and execute.
Regular expression efficiency.
tr.
Handling binary text.
Summary.
Complete learning
If you are looking for a complete course and not just a information on a single subject, visit our Listing and schedule page.

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