Good starting point to learn regular expressions.

Question

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Learning Regular Expressions

I'm good at learning new languages and platforms, though whenever I try to learn Reg Ex I cannot make sense of it. I once even used the Regular Expression Designer to try and put some together.

What's a good starting point to understanding what looks like the only rocket-science programming language in the world?

Links to articles, books or anything else that could help me get my grounding would be appreciated.

Answer 1

For me, this site was very useful:

Answer 2

http://www.regular-expressions.info/

A great reading resource, well written and explained. They cover basic theory and differences between a number of regex flavours. I refer to this site quite often.

Other resources? I prefer Expresso as my regex designer of choic. I find it very quick and easy to create and test expressions of any size or complexity. On the downside, it's .NET-centric so some of the expressions you build won't work in other environments.

Answer 3

i suggest you to buy this book, Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl

Answer 4

O'Reilly's Mastering Regular Expressions is a great book on this topic.

Answer 5

There are several interactive sites that are helpful:

• Regex Powertoy
• Rubular
• RegExr

Using Rick Measham's site to explain regex's is very helpful.

Looking at existing solutions at RegExLib is helpful.