Regex Quick Syntax Reference. Understanding and using Regular Expressions

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Contents......Page 3 Why Are Regular Expressions Important?......Page 8 What Are Regular Expressions?......Page 9 Frustrations with Regular Expressions Arise from Lack of Taking Action......Page 11 Regular Expressions Are Imperative......Page 12 The Language Family of Regular Expressions......Page 13 Summar y......Page 15 Formulating an Expression......Page 16 Arbitrary Character Class......Page 20 Alternative Execution......Page 21 Anchored Start and End......Page 22 Modifiers......Page 26 Summary......Page 28 Regular Expressions in JavaScript......Page 29 Other PCRE-Based Regex Environments......Page 40 Regular Expressions Are Finite State Machines......Page 58 Backtracking......Page 60 Deterministic and Nondeterministic Regex Modeling......Page 61 Basic Regex Simplifications......Page 67 Automatically Generating Regex FSMs......Page 68 Summar y......Page 71 Repeat Modifiers......Page 72 Backtracking......Page 73 Match at Least Once......Page 75 Match at Most Once: Optionals......Page 77 Match Any Number of Times......Page 78 Fixed-Range Matching......Page 79 Loop Exactly n Times......Page 82 Greedy Repeat Modifiers......Page 83 Lazy Repeat Modifiers......Page 84 Possessive Repeat Modifiers......Page 87 Summary......Page 89 Character Sets......Page 90 Character Set Ranges......Page 92 Character Set Classes......Page 93 Concatenating Advanced Language Constructs......Page 97 Summar y......Page 98 Substring Extraction from RegEx......Page 99 Defining Capture Groups......Page 100 Perl 6 Capture Groups......Page 101 Retrieval of Captured Substrings......Page 102 Reusing Captured Substrings Within a Regex......Page 108 Capture Groups and Performance......Page 110 Summary......Page 112 Lookahead......Page 113 Lookbehind......Page 116 Summary......Page 117 Maintaining Regular Expressions......Page 118 Extended Mode......Page 119 Regex Subroutines......Page 121 Named Capture Groups......Page 125 Case Study: XRegExp Library for JavaScript......Page 128 Summary......Page 131 Optimizing Regular Expressions......Page 133 Making Character Classes More Specific......Page 134 Repeating Character Class Loops......Page 136 Use Possessive Repeat Modifiers Whenever Possible......Page 137 Use Atomic Groups......Page 138 Optimization Techniques Limit Nondeterministic Execution......Page 140 Summary......Page 141 Parsing HTML Tags......Page 142 Processing the Query String of a URL......Page 145 This is not the End, but the Beginning......Page 147 “What If I Want to Learn More?”......Page 149 Keep in Touch......Page 150 Index......Page 151