Object Orientation and General technical topics - What are Regular Expressions?

Object Orientation and General technical topics module Q801

What are Regular Expressions?

Exercises, examples and other material relating to training module Q801. This topic is presented on public course Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are used when you want to test whether a string of text matches a particular pattern, and if it does match that pattern you want to extract elements of the match, also known as "interesting bits".

Related technical and longer articles

Pattern Matching - a primer on regular Expressions

Articles and tips on this subject		updated
2844	Learning about Regular Expressions in C through examples Although we more usually teach Regular Expressions on courses on Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, etc ... there is also a standard C library, which uses the POSIX flavour of regular expressions, and I've put a short example together to "show you how". Firstly - what is a regular expression? It's a "pattern ...	2010-06-30
2563	Efficient debugging of regular expressions Are you a programmer? Have you ever spent hours looking for a very odd bug in your code that, when you find and fix it, turns out to have been so blindingly obvious that you ask "why sis it take me so LONG" ... and so does the boss! The good news is that - if the boss is a programmer - (s)he will ...	2010-01-04
1195	Regular Express Primer Over the years I've been teaching people about Regular Expressions, I've learnt what does and doesn't work in such tuition. A casual question I saw yesterday got me writing, and I've just posted up a new technical article to the solution centre - see here (it will open in a separate window). It's ...	2007-05-21

Examples from our training material

mare	Some Advanced Regular Expression handling (Perl)

Pictures

Regular Expressions - a brief history

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 http://www.training-notes.co.uk.

Topics covered in this module

What are regular expressions?.
Why use regular expressions?.
Regular expression flavours - regular, Perl, POSIX, variants.
What are the alternatives?.
String manipulation functions.
Globbing.
Grammars.
Tokenizers.
Combinations.

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