This cookbook provides more than 100 recipes to help you crunch data and manipulate text with regular expressions. Every programmer can find uses for regular expressions, but their power doesn't come worry-free. Even seasoned users often suffer from poor performance, false positives, false negatives, or perplexing bugs. Regular Expressions Cookbook offers step-by-step instructions for some of the most common tasks involving this tool, with recipes for C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET.

With this book, you will:

• Understand the basics of regular expressions through a concise tutorial
• Use regular expressions effectively in several programming and scripting languages
• Learn how to validate and format input
• Manage words, lines, special characters, and numerical values
• Find solutions for using regular expressions in URLs, paths, markup, and data exchange
• Learn the nuances of more advanced regex features
• Understand how regular expressions' APIs, syntax, and behavior differ from language to language
• Write better regular expressions for custom needs

Whether you're a novice or an experienced user, Regular Expressions Cookbook will help deepen your knowledge of this unique and irreplaceable tool. You'll learn powerful new tricks, avoid language-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of proven solutions to difficult, real-world problems.