The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions
The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions
Finding Patterns in Everyday Text
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
About the Author
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
The Leanpub 60-day 100% Happiness Guarantee
Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.
See full terms
Do Well. Do Good.
Authors have earned$12,151,660writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub, earning 80% royalties while saving up to 25 million pounds of CO2 and up to 46,000 trees.
Learn more about writing on Leanpub
Free Updates. DRM Free.
If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).
Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.
Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.
Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them
Top Books
- #1
Ansible for DevOps
Jeff GeerlingAnsible is a simple, but powerful, server and configuration management tool. Learn to use Ansible effectively, whether you manage one server—or thousands.
- #2
CCIE Service Provider Version 4 Written and Lab Exam Comprehensive Guide
Nicholas RussoThe service provider landscape has changed rapidly over the past several years. Networking vendors are continuing to propose new standards, techniques, and procedures for overcoming new challenges while concurrently reducing costs and delivering new services. Cisco has recently updated the CCIE Service Provider track to reflect these changes; this book represents the author's personal journey in achieving that certification.
- #3
CCIE SP v5.0
Łukasz Bromirski, Piotr Jablonski, and Nicholas RussoAre you striving to prepare to and pass CCIE SP lab exam? Take the opportunity and get this workbook! With the attached initial cfg files you will prepare yourself for the CCIE SP exam as well as learn SP technologies applicable to all kinds of today modern networks! This workbook covers blueprint topics and provides challenging examples.
- #4
Functional Programming Made Easier
Charles ScalfaniA Functional Programming book from beginner to advanced without skipping a single step along the way.
In my 40 years of programming, I've felt that programming books always let me down, especially Functional Programming books. So, I wrote the book I wish I had 5 years ago.
Functional Programming will never be easy, but it can be easier.
- #5
C++20 - The Complete Guide
Nicolai M. JosuttisAll new language and library features of C++20 (for those who know previous C++ versions).
The book presents all new language and library features of C++20. Learn how this impacts day-to-day programming, to benefit in practice, to combine new features, and to avoid all new traps.
Buy early, pay less, free updates.
Other books:
- #6
Windows 11 Field Guide
Rafael Rivera and Paul ThurrottThe Windows 11 Field Guide is a full-length e-book about the latest version of Microsoft Windows, aimed at those users who will upgrade from Windows 10 or acquire Windows 11 with a new PC.
- #7
Production Haskell
Matt ParsonsAre you excited about Haskell, but don't know where to begin? Are you thrilled by the technical advantages, but worried about the unknown pitfalls? This book has you covered.
- #8
The PowerShell Scripting and Toolmaking Book
Don Jones and Jeff HicksLearn the patterns, practices, and details of PowerShell Scripting and Toolmaking from the industry's two most recognized experts on the subject.
- #9
The Art of Functional Programming
Minh Quang Tran, PhDA master class on the fundamentals and principles of functional programming. It contains 20 programming challenges with detailed solutions and 44 quizzes with answers and explanations. Moreover, 84 diagrams graphically illustrate how concepts and techniques work. Two real-world use cases show how to apply functional programming in practice.
- #10
Jetpack Compose internals
Jorge CastilloJetpack Compose is the future of Android UI. Master how it works internally and become a more efficient developer with it. You'll also find it valuable if you are not an Android dev. This book provides all the details to understand how the Compose compiler & runtime work, and how to create a client library using them.
Top Bundles
- #1
CCIE Service Provider Ultimate Study Bundle
2 Books
Piotr Jablonski, Lukasz Bromirski, and Nick Russo have joined forces to deliver the only CCIE Service Provider training resource you'll ever need. This bundle contains a detailed and challenging collection of workbook labs, plus an extensively detailed technical reference guide. All of us have earned the CCIE Service Provider certification... - #2
1500 QUIZ COMMENTATI (3 libri)
3 Books
Tre libri dei QUIZ MMG Commentati al prezzo di DUE! I QUIZ dei concorsi ufficiali di Medicina Generale relativi agli anni: 2000-2001-2003-2012-2013-2014-2015-2016-2017-2018-2019-2020-2021 +100 inediti Raccolti in unico bundle per aiutarvi nello studio e nella preparazione al concorso. All'interno di ogni libro i quiz sono stati suddivisi per... - #3
Pattern-Oriented Memory Forensics and Malware Detection
2 Books
This training bundle for security engineers and researchers, malware and memory forensics analysts includes two accelerated training courses for Windows memory dump analysis using WinDbg. It is also useful for technical support and escalation engineers who analyze memory dumps from complex software environments and need to check for possible... - #5
Growing Agile: The Complete Coach's Guide
7 Books
Growing Agile: Coach's Guide Series This bundle provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, handouts and activity... - #9
Statistics - All Lee Baker's Books
10 Books
This bundle includes all of the statistics books that Lee Baker has published at LeanPub 13 Statistics Books*1 PlaceNo Hassle! All in both epub and mobi formats - perfect for all devices and screen sizes. --------------------------------------------------------- *The book listed as Getting Started With Statistics is a bundle of 4 books...
