2. •
•
•
Definition
How a regex engine works
Applications
– Matching
•
•
Regex Pattern
Characters
–
–
–
•
•
Literal Characters
Special characters
Character classes/sets
Anchors
Repetition and optional items
– Extracting
•
•
•
Grouping
Alternation
Groups
– Replacing
•
Advanced topics
– Greediness
– Lookahead and lookbehind
•
Techniques for Faster Expressions
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3. • Basically, a regular expression is a pattern
describing a certain amount of text.
• Their name comes from the mathematical
theory on which they are based.
• Regular expressions provide a
powerful, flexible, and efficient method for
processing text.
• Sometimes it is also named regex or regexp.
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4. The centerpiece of text
processing with regular
expressions is the regex
engine.
A regex "engine" is a piece
of software that can
process regular
expressions, trying to
match the pattern to the
given string.
Usually, the engine is part
of a larger application and
you do not access the
engine directly.
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Regex
Engine
5. At a minimum, processing text using
regular expressions requires that the
Pattern
Input
engine be provided with the
following two items of information:
•The regular expression pattern to
Replacement
identify in the text.
•The text to parse for the regular
expression pattern.
• (Optionally) A replacement string.
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Regex Engine
6. •
Matching
The extensive pattern-matching
notation of regular expressions
enables you to quickly parse large
amounts of text to find specific
character patterns; to validate text to
Extracting
ensure that it matches a predefined
pattern; to extract, edit, replace, or
delete text substrings; and to add the
extracted strings to a collection in
Replacing
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order to generate a report.
9. • All characters except [^$.|?*+() refer to the
simple meaning of characters.
• All characters except the listed special
characters match a single instance of
themselves.
• Note: The regex engines are case sensitive by
default.
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10. • Most of the times we will
need special characters
for complex matches.
• These characters are
often called
metacharacters.
• The dot or period is one
of the most commonly
used. Unfortunately, it is
also the most commonly
misused metacharacter.
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• When a special char is
needed as literal, it
requires a backslash
followed by any of
metacharacters.
• A backslash escapes
special characters to
suppress their special
meaning.
11. Escaped
character
Description
Pattern
Matches
t
Matches a tab,
u0009.
(w+)t
"item1t",
"item2t" in
"item1titem2t"
r
Matches a carriage rn(w+)
return, u000D.
(r is not
equivalent to the
newline
character, n.)
"rnThese" in
"rnThese
arentwo lines."
n
Matches a new
line, u000A.
rn(w+)
"rnThese" in
"rnThese
arentwo lines."
s
Matches an empty w+sw+
space
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“Hello world” in
“Hello world”
12. A character class matches any one of a set of characters.
The order of the characters inside a character class does
not matter.
Positive
character
group
• A character in the input string
must match one of a
specified set of characters.
Negative
character
group
• A character in the input string
must not match one of a
specified set of characters.
Any
character
• The dot or period character is
a wildcard character that
matches any character
except n
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Shorthand classes
• Since certain character
classes are used often, a
series of shorthand
character classes are
available.
• Shorthand character classes
can be used both inside and
outside the square brackets.
• Some shorthand have
negated versions.
13. Anchor
Description
^
The match must occur
at the beginning of
the string or line.
$
The match must occur
at the end of the
string or line, or
before n at the end
of the string or line.
b
The match must occur
on a word boundary.
B
The match must not
occur on a word
boundary.
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• Anchors match a
position before,
after or between
characters.
• They can be used
to "anchor" the
regex match at a
certain position.
17. • A group, also known as a subexpression,
consists of an "open-group operator", any
number of other operators, and a "closegroup operator".
open-group-operator
close-group-operator
• Regex treats this sequence as a unit, just as
mathematics and programming languages
treat a parenthesized expression as a unit.
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18. • Alternation match one of a choice of regular
expressions:
– If you put the character(s) representing the
alternation operator between any two regular
expressions A and B, the result matches the
union of the strings that A and B match.
• It operates on the largest possible surrounding
regular expressions. Thus, the only way you
can delimit its arguments is to use grouping.
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19. • By placing part of a regular expression inside
round brackets or parentheses, you can group
that part of the regular expression together.
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21. Feature
.NET
Java
Perl
ECMA
Ruby
$& (whole regex match)
YES
error
YES
YES
no
$0 (whole regex match)
YES
YES
no
no
no
$1 through $99 (backreference)
YES
YES
YES
YES
no
${1} through ${99} (backreference)
YES
error
YES
no
no
${group} (named backreference)
YES
error
no
no
no
$` (backtick; subject text to the left of
the match)
YES
error
YES
YES
no
$' (straight quote; subject text to the
right of the match)
YES
error
YES
YES
no
$_ (entire subject string)
YES
error
YES
IE only
no
$+ (highest-numbered group in the
regex)
YES
error
no
IE and
Firefox
no
$$ (escape dollar with another dollar)
YES
error
no
YES
no
YES
error
no
YES
YES
$ (unescaped dollar as
The Nearshore Advantage!literal text)
23. • The repetition operators or quantifiers are
greedy.
• They will expand the match as far as they
can, and only give back if they must to satisfy the
remainder of the regex.
• The quick fix to this problem is to make the
quantifier lazy instead of greedy. Lazy quantifiers
are sometimes also called "ungreedy" or
"reluctant". You can do this by putting a question
mark behind the plus in the regex.
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24. Negative lookahead
• It is indispensable if you
want to match something
not followed by
something else.
Positive lookahead
• It is indispensable if you
want to match something
not followed by
something else.
Collectively, these are called "lookaround".
They do not consume characters in the string, but only assert whether a match
is possible or not.
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25. Common Sense
Techniques
•Avoid recompiling
•Use non-capturing parentheses
•Don't add superfluous parentheses
•Don't use superfluous character classes
•Use leading anchors
Expose Anchors
•Expose ^ and G at the front of expressions
•Expose $ at the end of expressions
Lazy Versus Greedy: Be
Specific
Lead the Engine to a
Match
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•The repetition operators or quantifiers are greedy.
•Put the most likely alternative first
•Distribute into the end of alternation
Anchors do not match any character at all. Instead, they match a position before, after or between characters. They can be used to "anchor" the regex match at a certain position. The caret ^ matches the position before the first character in the string. Applying ^a to abc matches a. ^b will not match abc at all, because the b cannot be matched right after the start of the string, matched by ^. See below for the inside view of the regex engine.Similarly, $ matches right after the last character in the string. c$ matches c in abc, while a$ does not match at all.There are three different positions that qualify as wordboundaries:Before the first character in the string, if the first character is a word character.After the last character in the string, if the last character is a word character.Between two characters in the string, where one is a word character and the other is not a word character.
Limiting Repetition { }Modern regex flavors (regex engines), like those discussed in this tutorial, have an additional repetition operator that allows you to specify how many times a token can be repeated. The syntax is {min,max}, where min is a positive integer number indicating the minimum number of matches, and max is an integer equal to or greater than min indicating the maximum number of matches. If the comma is present but max is omitted, the maximum number of matches is infinite. So {0,} is the same as*, and {1,} is the same as +. Omitting both the comma and max tells the engine to repeat the token exactly min times.
If you want to search for the literal text cat or dog, separate both options with a vertical bar or pipe symbol: cat|dog. If you want more options, simply expand the list: cat|dog|mouse|fish .The alternation operator has the lowest precedence of all regex operators. That is, it tells the regex engine to match either everything to the left of the vertical bar, or everything to the right of the vertical bar. If you want to limit the reach of the alternation, you will need to use round brackets for grouping. If we want to improve the first example to match whole words only, we would need to use \b(cat|dog)\b. This tells the regex engine to find a word boundary, then either "cat" or "dog", and then another word boundary.