If you’re a programmer new to regular expressions, this easy-to-follow guide is a great place to start. You’ll learn the fundamentals step-by-step with the help of numerous examples, discovering first-hand how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns.

Regular expressions are an essential part of a programmer’s toolkit, available in various Unix utlilities as well as programming languages such as Perl, Java, JavaScript, and C#. When you’ve finished this book, you’ll be familiar with the most commonly used syntax in regular expressions, and you’ll understand how using them will save you considerable time.

• Discover what regular expressions are and how they work


• Learn many of the differences between regular expressions used with command-line tools and in various programming languages


• Apply simple methods for finding patterns in text, including digits, letters, Unicode characters, and string literals


• Learn how to use zero-width assertions and lookarounds


• Work with groups, backreferences, character classes, and quantifiers


• Use regular expressions to mark up plain text with HTML5