Mastering Regular Expressions: Understand Your Data and Be More Productive 3rd Edition by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl (PDF)

Description

Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data. They are now standard features in a wide range of languages and popular tools, including Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, and MySQL.If you don’t use regular expressions 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 regularexpressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener.As this book shows, a command of regular expressions is an invaluable skill. Regular expressions allow you to code complex and subtle text processing that you never imagined could be automated. Regular expressions can save you time and aggravation. They can be used to craft elegant solutions to a wide range of problems. Once you’ve mastered regular expressions, they’ll become an invaluable part of your toolkit. You will wonder how you ever got by without them.Yet despite their wide availability, flexibility, and unparalleled power, regular expressions are frequently underutilized. Yet what is power in the hands of an expert can be fraught with peril for the unwary. Mastering Regular Expressions will help you navigate the minefield to becoming an expert and help you optimize your use of regular expressions. Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition, now includes a full chapter devoted to PHP and its powerful and expressive suite of regular expression functions, in addition to enhanced PHP coverage in the central “core” chapters. Furthermore, this edition has been updated throughout to reflect advances in other languages, including expanded in-depth coverage of Sun’s java.util.regex package, which has emerged as the standard Java regex implementation.Topics include:A comparison of features among different versions of many languages and toolsHow the regular expression engine worksOptimization (major savings available here!)Matching just what you want, but not what you don’t wantSections and chapters on individual languagesWritten in the lucid, entertaining tone that makes a complex, dry topic become crystal-clear to programmers, and sprinkled with solutions to complex real-world problems, Mastering Regular Expressions, Third Edition offers a wealth information that you can put to immediateuse.Reviews of this new edition and the second edition:”There isn’t a better (or more useful) book available on regular expressions.”–Zak Greant, Managing Director, eZ Systems”A real tour-de-force of a book which not only covers the mechanics of regexes in extraordinary detail but also talks about efficiency and the use of regexes in Perl, Java, and .NET…If you use regular expressions as part of your professional work (even if you already have a good book on whatever language you’re programming in) I would strongly recommend this book to you.”–Dr. Chris Brown, Linux Format”The author does an outstanding job leading the reader from regexnovice to master. The book is extremely easy to read and chock full ofuseful and relevant examples…Regular expressions are valuable toolsthat every developer should have in their toolbox. Mastering RegularExpressions is the definitive guide to the subject, and an outstandingresource that belongs on every programmer’s bookshelf. Ten out of TenHorseshoes.”–Jason Menard, Java Ranch

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Lots of good information, well organized, well presented.My only complaint is the fonts. Both the text of the book and the source code. The font used for the regular text is very light, I would have preferred a larger, darker, and more bold font. The font used for the source code is absolutely horrible. There are little angle brackets used to identify a block (for example to highlight what has changed from the prior example). They are almost impossible to see. This is important because the author is constantly referring to the highlighted portions. Some pages are darker print than others, its inconsistent.If another edition of this book is ever made, I would like to see larger more bold font, and use a completely different method to “highlight” portions of text in the code samples.I wonder if this font issues occur in the Kindle edition…?

⭐I use to google “regex” and refer to the websites that would show from the search results. In my opinion, most of these sites were hard to use when trying to really understand regex. Maybe I wasn’t persistent enough to screen crawl through several regex webpages/websites. I knew in my very soul I didn’t understand regex well, because of constant issues coming up with seemingly easy regular expressions. I finally decided I wanted something comprehensive to learn regex.This book gave me the level of understanding I was looking for. After reading this book I can confidently say that I’m 1000% more comfortable reading and creating my own regex. I stopped once I reached chapter 7 because the last chapters, 7-10 are language specific chapters, but in the future I’ll definitely refer back to those chapters once I’m working with those languages.Lastly, I did get some flak from other devs while I was reading this book “Geez you’re reading a book on regex?? wow that’s too boring for me.” etc. etc. Don’t listen to the haters! If you want a greater understanding of regex, and this book can get you there then don’t listen to those nerds. At the end of the day and with learning anything, it only matters that the nerd in your shoes understands the subject. Also, take your time reading the book. It’s perfectly fine to pace yourself and take more time reading, because there’s a lot of needed detail.

⭐I’m sure like most, regex always seemed like some mystical thing. I honestly bought this book 10 years ago, and it’s been on my programmer’s bookshelf since, unread until recently. Wow, talk about missing out on life! This book honestly distills all the mystery, piercing the veil of esoteric knowledge that is regex, and finally reveals it in a clear and succinct language that mere mortals like myself can understand. This book is honestly an essential read for every programmer.

⭐Incredibly well written and thought out, Mastering Regular Expressions explains both the syntax and philosophy behind regular expressions. You’ll find that it is throughly researched, every nuance of a given regex implementation of the four featured languages (Perl, Java, ASP and PHP) is covered in extraordinary detail, containing information available NO WHERE online.I bought this book after tooling around with regular expressions for a year or so and having limited success, my training having been limited to short online tutorials. After reading Friedl’s guide, I have become much better at CORRECTLY programming regular expressions and “thinking regular expressions”, that is, changing my outlook on a given task in order to apply regular expressions. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who deals with textual data on a daily basis, including, programmers, web developers and writers of any type.

⭐This is the standard textbook on Regular Expressions and for good reason. The third edition however covers the different shades of RegEx from many programming perspectives including {Egrep, Perl, PHP, Java, .NET}A mix of humor coupled with real examples will get you to master status with RegEx in no time. I have read this book like 5 times and still use it a lot.This book does for RegEx what Cormen’s book does for Algorithms.

⭐I have had occasion to require regular expressions in my code and it has always been a matter of trial and error, or looking online for something that should work. Some books have a chapter dedicated to regular expressions but I have always found them confusing.Enter Jeffrey Friedl and this excellent text. This man is a superb teacher. He not only explains well but also preempts every doubt I could have as I read his work.His examples are thorough.My only hope is that he writes other books.

⭐Great

⭐Great book I like it

⭐I am drawn to report on a book I have owned for many years, because it seems to have fewer stars here than it deserves. I think this is because of problems some folks have had with electronic formats. I do see their point, but this is unfair to the editorial content.So. The following applies to the *paperback* book.In practice Freidl’s book is primarily a programmer’s reference. But like the best references (eg the C Programming Language) is formatted as a tutorial.Introductory chapters establish a need for regexs, giving a brief history and presenting some straightforward use cases.Thereafter Mr Freidl wades deeper into the waters of obscurity, and we are soon dealing with the minutiae of mode modifiers and greedy versus lazy quantifiers.Some of this stuff goes rather deeper than I have ever needed to go. For example, opening the book at random to page 245, I read the subheadings ‘Pre-check of required character/substring optimization’ and ‘Length-cognizance optimization’. Not of immediate use to me, but I am glad to know where I can find this if ever (heaven forfend) the performance of my application depends on the construction of regexs.The last chapters of the book deal with the respective peculiarities and APIs of the regex implementations of Perl, Java, .NET and PHP. This last bit feels a little out of date – an updated edition would, I suppose, highlight JavaScript and other languages that have become important or gained regex implementations since the 2006 edition, eg C++ 11 and even Delphi. Meanwhile Perl’s star has faded somewhat since the book was last revised; perhaps it should no longer be the ‘default’ language of example?But this is nit-picking. I dare say it is possible to resolve any regex difficulty with a little applied Googling; but to have this book on your shelf is to know that you have an articulate, clear and complete explanation close to hand.

⭐I bought this book to help build up an understanding of regular expressions (regex), after finding the information on the internet confusing and fragmented. This book does a good job of explaining regex, it’s benefits, it’s uses and various implentations. I initially needed the book to be able to identify specifc content in emails (dates/product numbers), but now find I use them all the time when working with text for anything but the most basic string operations.Would recommend this for any programmer who does not already know regular expressions or that needs to get a thorough understanding. As long as you use strings you will be able to draw some benefit.As for me, I wonder how I ever managed without!

⭐Great book, must have for those serious about scripting and text parsing.

⭐A perfect book to start to manage RegEx!

⭐I have read the first edition of ‘Mastering Regular Expressions’ many years ago and that was an enormous boost to my ability of using regular expressions. In the meantime, a lot has happened in this area and because in my current job I use non-trivial regexes frequently, I thought getting the latest version of Jeffrey’s book might be a good idea. It was. Compared to the first edition, there is a lot of new and updated material.Even though I already knew quite a bit about this topic, this is still one of the very best technical books I’ve ever read (and I don’t give five stars easily). No light reading at all, though. But the writing style of Jeffrey helps a lot to make things interesting and approachable. At the same time he succeeds to think razor-sharp, not forgetting corner cases. Sometimes it’s almost frightening how he remembers to check and point out all possibilities. And again, all this without becoming repetitive, boring or anything the like.The 31-page index is quite complete and definitely useful and the hundreds of cross references in the text are a boon. I’d have appreciated a few more tables or, better yet, an appendix with the existing tables all collected once more in one place for easy reference. But then, this book is not a reference, it is a book from which you can learn the ins and outs of regular expressions. And it does a very good job teaching this, starting out with an introduction to regular expressions and simple examples. A complete regex beginner might stop reading after the first one or two chapters, get his or her hands dirty with regexes for a while and then continue reading after a few months of using regular expressions. Some more complex samples follow and then an overview of regular expression features and flavours. For casual users the difference between DFA and NFA engines might not be so important, but the more you use regular expressions and the more complex things you start to solve with them, the more such differences become apparent. When you start to apply your knowledge to larger amounts of data, suddenly knowing about efficiency, which has its own chapter, or the mechanics of processing (another chapter) makes a huge difference. Need to handle unicode? Yes, Jeffrey has this covered too, just as regex use in various scripting languages, such as Java, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python, Tcl. Four of them, Perl, Java, .NET and PHP, even have their own chapters (which I did not read all).If you want to learn about regular expressions, I can not imagine a better or more complete book to turn to. And if you’re just curious about regexes, then read the first one or two chapters and start being impressed by how much simpler many data manipulation tasks suddenly become. You’ll definitely pull out this book again from your bookshelf and continue reading after some time.

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