By Jeffrey E.F. Friedl
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Final Release Date: January 1997
Pages: 368
Regular expressions are a powerful tool for manipulating text and data. If you don't use them yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regular expressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener.With regular expressions, you can save yourself time and aggravation while dealing with documents, mail messages, log files -- you name it -- any type of text or data. For example, regular expressions can play a vital role in constructing a World Wide Web CGI script, which can involve text and data of all sorts.Regular expressions are not a tool in and of themselves, but are included as part of a larger utility. The classic example is grep. These days, regular expressions can be found everywhere, such as in:
- Scripting languages (including Perl, Tcl, awk, and Python)
- Editors (including Emacs, vi, and Nisus Writer)
- Programming environments (including Delphi and Visual C++)
While many of these tools originated on UNIX, they are now available for a wide variety of platforms, including DOS/Windows and MacOS, so you can use them in your home environment. Additionally, many favorite programming languages offer regular-expression libraries, so you can include support for them in your own programs, and yes, even applets.There can be certain subtle, but valuable, ways to think when you're using regular expressions, and these can be taught. Jeffrey Friedl has spent years helping people on the Net understand and use regular expressions. In this book he leads you through the steps of knowing exactly how to craft a regular expression to get the job done.Regular expressions are not used in a vacuum. In this book, a variety of tools are examined and used in an extensive array of examples, with a major focus on Perl. Perl is extremely well endowed with rich and expressive regular expressions. Yet what is power in the hands of an expert can be fraught with peril for the unwary. This book will help you navigate the minefield to becoming an expert.
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- Title:
- Mastering Regular Expressions
- By:
- Jeffrey E.F. Friedl
- Publisher:
- O'Reilly Media
- Formats:
-
- Print:
- January 1997
- Pages:
- 368
- Print ISBN:
- 978-1-56592-257-0
- | ISBN 10:
- 1-56592-257-3
|
Colophon Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The birds featured on the cover of Mastering Regular Expressions are owls. There are two families and approximately 180 species of these birds of prey distributed throughout the world, with the exception of Antarctica. Owls are physically characterized by their large heads, flats faces, large, forward-facing eyes, hooked beaks, and sharp claws. Most, although not all, species of owl are nocturnal hunters, feeding entirely on live animals, ranging in size from insects to hares. Because they have little ability to move their large, forward-facing eyes, owls must move their entire heads in order to look around. They can rotate their heads up to 270 degrees, and some can turn their heads completely upside down. Owls ears are highly sensitive to the frequency and direction of sounds. Many species of owl have asymmetrical ear placement, which enable them to more easily locate their prey in dim or dark light. Owl feathers are soft, allowing them to fly noiselessly and thus to surprise their prey. Because their large eyes give them the appearance of intellectual depth, owls have been portrayed in folklore through the ages as wise creatures. Because of this, they are viewed by humans differently than most birds of prey, which are considered, in an anthropomorphic way, to be evil and cold-blooded. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them.Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on Nutshell Handbooks, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.The inside layout was designed by Mary Jane Walsh. The text was prepared by Jeffrey Friedl in a hybrid markup of his own design, mixing SGML, raw troff, raw PostScript, and his own markup. A home-grown filter translated the latter to the other, lower-level markups, the result of which was processed by a locally-modified version of O'Reilly's SGML tools (this step requiring upwards of an hour of raw processing time, and over 75 megabytes of process space, just for Chapter 7!). That result was then processed by a locally-modified version of James Clark's gtroff, producing camera-ready PostScript for O'Reilly.The text was written and processed on an IBM ThinkPad 755 CX, provided by Omron Corporation, running Linux the X Windows System, and Mule (Multilingual Emacs). A notoriously poor speller, Jeffrey made heavy use of ispell and its Emacs interface. For imaging during development, Jeffrey used Ghostscript (from Aladdin Enterprises, Menlo Park, California), as well as an Apple Color Laser Writer 12/600PS provided by Omron. Test prints at 1270dpi were kindly provided by Ken Lunde, of Adobe Systems, using a Linotronic L300-J.Ken Lunde also provided a number of special font and typesetting needs, including custom-designed characters and Japanese characters from Adobe Systems's Heisei Mincho W3 typeface.The figures were originally created by Jeffrey using xfig, as well as Thomas Williams's and Colin Kelley's gnuplot. They were then greatly enhanced by Chris Reilley using Macromedia Freehand.The text is set in ITC Garamond Light; code is set in ConstantWillison; figure labels are in Helvetica Black. |
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Product Details
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Colophon
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Customer Reviews
3/16/2011 (3 of 3 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Great book--how to parse data By Charlie from Washington - Accurate
- Easy to understand
- Helpful examples
- Well-written
6/25/2002 (5 of 6 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Chris Nestor from Undisclosed 4/25/2002 (2 of 2 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Chris Widhelm from Undisclosed 2/15/2002 (1 of 1 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Ashley Grant from Undisclosed 10/24/2001 (2 of 2 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Emil Wayers from Undisclosed 7/30/2001 (1 of 1 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Serafim Junior Fagundes from Undisclosed 2/22/2001 (1 of 1 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Dave Lindquist from Undisclosed 11/18/2000 (2 of 2 customers found this review helpful) 5.0Mastering Regular Expressions Review By Martin A. from Undisclosed |
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