Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Introducing Regular Expressions 3
Understanding the Need 3
How Regular Expressions Are Used 4
RegEx Searches 4
RegEx Replaces 5
So What Exactly Is a Regular Expression? 5
Using Regular Expressions 6
Before You Get Started 7
Summary 7
Chapter 2 Matching Single Characters 9
Matching Literal Text 9
How Many Matches? 10
Handling Case Sensitivity 10
Matching Any Characters 11
Matching Special Characters 14
Summary 16
Chapter 3 Matching Sets of Characters 17
Matching One of Several Characters 17
Using Character Set Ranges 20
“Anything But” Matching 23
Summary 24
Chapter 4 Using Metacharacters 25
Escaping Revisited 25
Matching Whitespace Characters 28
Matching Specific Character Types 29
Matching Digits (and Nondigits) 29
Matching Alphanumeric Characters (and Nonalphanumeric Characters) 31
Matching Whitespace (and Nonwhitespace) 32
Specifying Hexadecimal or Octal Values 32
Using POSIX Character Classes 33
Summary 35
Chapter 5 Repeating Matches 37
How Many Matches? 37
Matching One or More Characters 38
Matching Zero or More Characters 40
Matching Zero or One Characters 42
Using Intervals 44
Exact Interval Matching 44
Range Interval Matching 45
“At Least” Interval Matching 46
Preventing Over Matching 48
Summary 49
Chapter 6 Position Matching 51
Using Boundaries 51
Using Word Boundaries 52
Defining String Boundaries 54
Using Multiline Mode 57
Summary 58
Chapter 7 Using Subexpressions 59
Understanding Subexpressions 59
Grouping with Subexpressions 60
Nesting Subexpressions 63
Summary 66
Chapter 8 Using Backreferences 67
Understanding Backreferences 67
Matching with Backreferences 70
Performing Replace Operations 73
Converting Case 75
Summary 76
Chapter 9 Looking Ahead and Behind 77
Introducing Lookaround 77
Looking Ahead 78
Looking Behind 80
Combining Lookahead and Lookbehind 82
Negating Lookaround 83
Summary 85
Chapter 10 Embedding Conditions 87
Why Embed Conditions? 87
Using Conditions 88
Backreference Conditions 88
Lookaround Conditions 90
Summary 92
Chapter 11 Regular Expression Solutions to Common Problems 93
North American Phone Numbers 93
U.S. ZIP Codes 95
Canadian Postal Codes 95
United Kingdom Postcodes 96
U.S. Social Security Numbers 97
IP Addresses 98
URLs 98
Complete URLs 99
Email Addresses 100
HTML Comments 101
JavaScript Comments 102
Credit Card Numbers 103
Summary 107
Appendix A Regular Expressions in Popular Applications and Languages 109
grep 109
Java 110
JavaScript 111
Microsoft .NET 111
Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL 112
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 112
MySQL 113
Oracle PL/SQL 114
Perl 114
PHP 115
Python 116
9780134757063 TOC 4/5/2018
