The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions
This book is 60% complete
Last updated on 2013-04-02
About the Book
This is a spinoff of a chapter from the Bastards Book of Ruby. Regular expressions are an essential and useful skill even outside of programming. They can serve not only as a handy tool for anyone whose work involves writing or data, but also act as a gateway into more interesting and complex kinds of programming. While you're waiting for me to finish this experiment in self-publishing, you can get a good start by reading the massive chapter on regular expressions in the BBoR
Table of Contents
- Regular Expressions are for Everyone
- FAQ
- Release notes & changelog
- Getting Started
- Finding a proper text editor
- Why a dedicated text editor?
- Windows text editors
- Mac Text Editors
- Sublime Text
- Online regex testing sites
- A better Find-and-Replace
- How to find and replace
- The limitations of Find-and-Replace
- There’s more than find-and-replace
- Your first regex
- Hello, word boundaries
- Word boundaries
- Escape with backslash
- Regex Fundamentals
- Removing emptiness
- The newline character
- Viewing invisible characters
- Match one-or-more with the plus sign
- The plus operator
- Backslash-s
- Match zero-or-more with the star sign
- The star sign
- Specific and limited repetition
- Curly braces
- Curly braces, maximum and no-limit matching
- Cleaning messily-spaced data
- Anchors: A way to trim emptiness
- The caret as starting anchor
- The dollar sign as the ending anchor
- Escaping special characters
- Matching any letter, any number
- The numeric character class
- Word characters
- Bracketed character classes
- Matching ranges of characters with brackets and hyphens
- All the characters with dot
- Negative character sets
- Negative character sets
- Capture, Reuse
- Parentheses for precedence
- Parentheses for captured groups
- Correcting dates with capturing groups
- Using parentheses without capturing
- Optionality and alternation
- Alternation with the pipe character
- Optionality with the question mark
- Laziness and greediness
- Greediness
- Laziness
- Lookarounds
- Positive lookahead
- Negative lookahead
- Positive lookbehind
- Negative lookbehind
- The importance of zero-width (TODO)
- Regexes in Real Life
- Why learn Excel?
- The limits of Excel (todo)
- Delimitation
- Mixed commas and other delimiters
- Dealing with text charts (todo)
- Completely unstructured text (todo)
- Moving in and out and into Excel
- From Data to HTML (TODO)
- Simple HTML tricks
- Example Domain
- Tabular data to HTML tables
- Mocking full web pages from data
- Visualizations
- The Exercises
- Data Cleaning with the Stars
- Normalized alphabetical titles
- Make your own delimiters
- Finding needles in haystacks (TODO)
- Shakespeare’s longest word
- Changing phone format (TODO)
- Telephone game
- Ordering names and dates (TODO)
- Year, months, days
- Names
- Preparing for a spreadsheet
- Dating, Associated Press Style (TODO)
- Scenario
- The AP Date format
- Real-world considerations
- The limits of regex
- Sorting a police blotter
- Sloppy copy-and-paste
- Start loose and simple
- Conclusion
- Converting XML to tab-delimited data
- The payments XML
- The pattern
- Add more delimitation
- Cleaning up Microsoft Word HTML (TODO)
- Switching visualizations (TODO)
- A visualization in Excel
- From Excel to Google Static Chart
- From Google Static Charts to Google Interactive Charts
- Cleaning up OCR Text (TODO)
- Scenario
- Cheat Sheet
- Moving forward
- Additional references and resources
About the Author
Dan Nguyen is the author of the still-incomplete Bastards Book of Ruby and Photography. He is currently Head of Data at Skift and was formerly a news application developer at the investigative newsroom, ProPublica.
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