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| Preface | |
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| Introduction to Regular Expressions | |
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| Solving Real Problems | |
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| Regular Expressions as a Language | |
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| The Filename Analogy | |
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| The Language Analogy | |
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| The Regular-Expression Frame of Mind | |
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| If You Have Some Regular-Expression Experience | |
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| Searching Text Files: Egrep | |
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| Egrep Metacharacters | |
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| Start and End of the Line | |
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| Character Classes | |
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| Matching Any Character with Dot | |
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| Alternation | |
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| Ignoring Differences in Capitalization | |
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| Word Boundaries | |
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| In a Nutshell | |
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| Optional Items | |
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| Other Quantifiers: Repetition | |
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| Parentheses and Backreferences | |
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| The Great Escape | |
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| Expanding the Foundation | |
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| Linguistic Diversification | |
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| The Goal of a Regular Expression | |
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| A Few More Examples | |
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| Regular Expression Nomenclature | |
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| Improving on the Status Quo | |
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| Summary | |
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| Personal Glimpses | |
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| Extended Introductory Examples | |
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| About the Examples | |
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| A Short Introduction to Perl | |
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| Matching Text with Regular Expressions | |
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| Toward a More Real-World Example | |
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| Side Effects of a Successful Match | |
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| Intertwined Regular Expressions | |
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| Intermission | |
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| Modifying Text with Regular Expressions | |
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| Example: Form Letter | |
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| Example: Prettifying a Stock Price | |
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| Automated Editing | |
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| A Small Mail Utility | |
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| Adding Commas to a Number with Lookaround | |
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| Text-to-HTML Conversion | |
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| That Doubled-Word Thing | |
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| Overview of Regular Expression Features and Flavors | |
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| A Casual Stroll Across the Regex Landscape | |
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| The Origins of Regular Expressions | |
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| At a Glance | |
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| Care and Handling of Regular Expressions | |
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| Integrated Handling | |
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| Procedural and Object-Oriented Handling | |
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| A Search-and-Replace Example | |
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| Search and Replace in Other Languages | |
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| Care and Handling: Summary | |
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| Strings, Character Encodings, and Modes | |
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| Strings as Regular Expressions | |
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| Character-Encoding Issues | |
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| Regex Modes and Match Modes | |
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| Common Metacharacters and Features | |
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| Character Representations | |
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| Character Classes and Class-Like Constructs | |
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| Anchors and Other "Zero-Width Assertions" | |
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| Comments and Mode Modifiers | |
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| Grouping, Capturing, Conditionals, and Control | |
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| Guide to the Advanced Chapters | |
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| The Mechanics of Expression Processing | |
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| Start Your Engines! | |
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| Two Kinds of Engines | |
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| New Standards | |
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| Regex Engine Types | |
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| From the Department of Redundancy Department | |
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| Testing the Engine Type | |
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| Match Basics | |
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| About the Examples | |
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| The Match That Begins Earliest Wins | |
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| Engine Pieces and Parts | |
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| The Standard Quantifiers Are Greedy | |
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| Regex-Directed Versus Text-Directed | |
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| NFA Engine: Regex-Directed | |
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| DFA Engine: Text-Directed | |
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| First Thoughts: NFA and DFA in Comparison | |
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| Backtracking | |
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| A Really Crummy Analogy | |
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| Two Important Points on Backtracking | |
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| Saved States | |
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| Backtracking and Greediness | |
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| More About Greediness and Backtracking | |
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| Problems of Greediness | |
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| Multi-Character "Quotes" | |
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| Using Lazy Quantifiers | |
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| Greediness and Laziness Always Favor a Match | |
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| The Essence of Greediness, Laziness, and Backtracking | |
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| Possessive Quantifiers and Atomic Grouping | |
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| Possessive Quantifiers, ?+, *+, ++, and {m,n}+ | |
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| The Backtracking of Lookaround | |
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| Is Alternation Greedy? | |
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| Taking Advantage of Ordered Alternation | |
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| NFA, DFA, and POSIX | |
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| "The Longest-Leftmost" | |
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| POSIX and the Longest-Leftmost Rule | |
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| Speed and Efficiency | |
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| Summary: NFA and DFA in Comparison | |
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| Summary | |
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| Practical Regex Techniques | |
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| Regex Balancing Act | |
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| A Few Short Examples | |
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| Continuing with Continuation Lines | |
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| Matching an IP Address | |
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| Working with Filenames | |
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| Matching Balanced Sets of Parentheses | |
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| Watching Out for Unwanted Matches | |
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| Matching Delimited Text | |
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| Knowing Your Data and Making Assumptions | |
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| Stripping Leading and Trailing Whitespace | |
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| HTML-Related Examples | |
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| Matching an HTML Tag | |
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| Matching an HTML Link | |
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| Examining an HTTP URL | |
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| Validating a Hostname | |
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| Plucking Out a URL in the Real World | |
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| Extended Examples | |
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| Keeping in Sync with Your Data | |
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| Parsing CSV Files | |
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| Crafting an Efficient Expression | |
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| A Sobering Example | |
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| A Simple Change--Placing Your Best Foot Forward | |
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| Efficiency Verses Correctness | |
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| Advancing Further--Localizing the Greediness | |
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| Reality Check | |
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| A Global View of Backtracking | |
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| More Work for a POSIX NFA | |
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| Work Required During a Non-Match | |
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| Being More Specific | |
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| Alternation Can Be Expensive | |
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| Benchmarking | |
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| Know What You're Measuring | |
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| Benchmarking with Java | |
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| Benchmarking with VB.NET | |
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| Benchmarking with Python | |
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| Benchmarking with Ruby | |
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| Benchmarking with Tcl | |
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| Common Optimizations | |
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| No Free Lunch | |
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| Everyone's Lunch is Different | |
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| The Mechanics of Regex Application | |
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| Pre-Application Optimizations | |
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| Optimizations with the Transmission | |
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| Optimizations of the Regex Itself | |
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| Techniques for Faster Expressions | |
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| Common Sense Techniques | |
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| Expose Literal Text | |
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| Expose Anchors | |
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| Lazy Versus Greedy: Be Specific | |
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| Split Into Multiple Regular Expressions | |
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| Mimic Initial-Character Discrimination | |
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| Use Atomic Grouping and Possessive Quantifiers | |
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| Lead the Engine to a Match | |
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| Unrolling the Loop | |
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| Building a Regex From Past Experiences | |
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| The Real "Unrolling-the-Loop" Pattern | |
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| A Top-Down View | |
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| An Internet Hostname | |
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| Observations | |
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| Using Atomic Grouping and Possessive Quantifiers | |
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| Short Unrolling Examples | |
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| Unrolling C Comments | |
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| The Freeflowing Regex | |
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| A Helping Hand to Guide the Match | |
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| A Well-Guided Regex is a Fast Regex | |
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| Wrapup | |
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| In Summary: Think! | |
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| Perl | |
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| Regular Expressions as a Language Component | |
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| Perl's Greatest Strength | |
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| Perl's Greatest Weakness | |
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| Perl's Regex Flavor | |
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| Regex Operands and Regex Literals | |
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| How Regex Literals Are Parsed | |
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| Regex Modifiers | |
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| Regex-Related Perlisms | |
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| Expression Context | |
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| Dynamic Scope and Regex Match Effects | |
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| Special Variables Modified by a Match | |
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| The qr/.../ Operator and Regex Objects | |
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| Building and Using Regex Objects | |
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| Viewing Regex Objects | |
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| Using Regex Objects for Efficiency | |
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| The Match Operator | |
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| Match's Regex Operand | |
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| Specifying the Match Target Operand | |
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| Different Uses of the Match Operator | |
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| Iterative Matching: Scalar Context, with /g | |
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| The Match Operator's Environmental Relations | |
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| The Substitution Operator | |
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| The Replacement Operand | |
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| The /e Modifier | |
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| Context and Return Value | |
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| The Split Operator | |
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| Basic Split | |
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| Returning Empty Elements | |
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| Split's Special Regex Operands | |
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| Split's Match Operand with Capturing Parentheses | |
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| Fun with Perl Enhancements | |
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| Using a Dynamic Regex to Match Nested Pairs | |
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| Using the Embedded-Code Construct | |
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| Using local in an Embedded-Code Construct | |
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| A Warning About Embedded Code and my Variables | |
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| Matching Nested Constructs with Embedded Code | |
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| Overloading Regex Literals | |
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| Problems with Regex-Literal Overloading | |
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| Mimicking Named Capture | |
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| Perl Efficiency Issues | |
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| "There's More Than One Way to Do It" | |
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| Regex Compilation, the /o Modifier, qr/.../, and Efficiency | |
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| Understanding the "Pre-Match" Copy | |
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| The Study Function | |
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| Benchmarking | |
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| Regex Debugging Information | |
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| Final Comments | |
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| Java | |
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| Judging a Regex Package | |
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| Technical Issues | |
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| Social and Political Issues | |
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| Object Models | |
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| A Few Abstract Object Models | |
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| Growing Complexity | |
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| Packages, Packages, Packages | |
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| Why So Many "Perl5" Flavors? | |
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| Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks | |
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| Recommendations | |
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| Sun's Regex Package | |
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| Regex Flavor | |
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| Using java.util.regex | |
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| The Pattern.compile() Factory | |
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| The Matcher Object | |
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| Other Pattern Methods | |
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| A Quick Look at Jakarta-ORO | |
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| ORO's Perl5Util | |
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| A Mini Perl5Util Reference | |
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| Using ORO's Underlying Classes | |
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| .NET | |
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| .NET's Regex Flavor | |
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| Additional Comments on the Flavor | |
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| Using .NET Regular Expressions | |
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| Regex Quickstart | |
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| Package Overview | |
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| Core Object Overview | |
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| Core Object Details | |
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| Creating Regex Objects | |
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| Using Regex Objects | |
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| Using Match Objects | |
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| Using Group Objects | |
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| Static "Convenience" Functions | |
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| Regex Caching | |
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| Support Functions | |
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| Advanced .NET | |
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| Regex Assemblies | |
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| Matching Nested Constructs | |
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| Capture Objects | |
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| Index | |