Good Description of what I've Been Doing But Didn't Know It

I picked this book up because I had no idea just what a Regular Expression was. Turns out that regular expressions are nothing more than the "wildcards" from a lot of applications like Microsoft Word that have been generalized to fit a lot of applications in text processing.

For instance you may want to examine an incoming field from an internet form. If the data is going to a social security column in a database, you want to be sure that the data doesn't say something like Fred-34-1234. It's the right format, but alpha isn't a good thing to have there. If this isn't checked form, it may wait until the SQL Insert statement blows up.

The generalized form of expressions like this can be used to check things like SSN formats, the proper formation of an e-mail address and a lot of other things commonly needed in text processing.

Many languages both programming and scripting have provisions built into them to handle this kind of text processing. This book provides the generalized background to use regular expressions in ways that that you haven't considered but which you'll find very useful.

Other Reviews

• A very thorough book on regex
• Adequate for beginners...
• Excellent Introduction to Regular Expressions
• Good Description of what I've Been Doing But Didn't Know It