Regex: Ending the Madness...

[SlightlyLoony]

With this post I'm ending the series on regular expressions. If you have specific questions about regular expressions that I haven't already addressed, I'd be happy to answer them in a post for everyone to benefit from (or suffer with!) — just leave a comment on this post.

This news is just what the little feller at right wanted to hear!

Here are some resources you might find useful if you want to pursue regexes further:

Mastering Regular Expressions: my favorite book on the topic, and almost certainly more than you will ever want to know...

There are many online references for JavaScript regular expressions. Here's one of my favorites.

Three different free, online regular expression testers: here, here, and here. Each of these has different strengths and weaknesses, but all are generally useful (and much easier than writing code for this purpose!).

If you're a developer and you use the Eclipse IDE, you might want to check out the QuickREx plugin. It does a nice job of letting you test and debug regexes right in the IDE, and lets you choose which regex engine you're testing with. It doesn't direclty support the JavaScript regex engine, but choosing PERL will get you very, very close.

What did I mean just now when I said "regex engine"? Just this: many programming languages support regular expressions, but the implementation is different in each language. Those implementations are the "engines". For some languages (such as Java), there are even multiple different regex engines to choose from (hence QuickREx's selections). In this series I've only been describing JavaScript regexes. For the most part, these are very standard between all of the browser implementations. There are a few browsers (Chrome, for example) that extend their regex implementation beyond the standard. So far as I'm aware, all modern browsers (and our server-side JavaScript) support the documented set of JavaScript regular expression features...

Whew!