Next Generation Regexp

prostoalex writes "Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, author of newly published 2nd edition of Mastering Regular Expressions, wrote a feature article for O'Reilly Network on the recent innovations in the regular expression world. You'd think that such area as regular expressions would be fairly stable, but according to the author, 'when I started to work on the second edition of Mastering Regular Expressions and started refocusing on the field, I was rather shocked to find out how much had really changed'. The article's behind-the-scene purpose is apparently to push a new book that O'Reilly published this month, but it has great educational value for anyone involved with practical extracting and reporting."

Comments

Re:.NET regexps and Microsoft's documentation

[AnalogBoy]

The only computer books i've ever read which actually read well were "Upgrading and Repairing PC's" (So much so i wrote the author) and "The practice of system and network administration".

If only all books could be written as well.. *sigh*...

In-depth... summary. In-depth... Summary.

Re:regexp and programmers

[pHDNgell]

Perhaps if you are looking for perl programmers who will need to be doing a lot of textual processing, but that's definitely not the case in other areas.

I prefer to work with people who don't do a lot of regex, because they're less likely to use them for everything. I haven't worked on a large project that used regular expressions in years. I feel pretty good about that.

Sure, I've used them in a couple small scripts for parsing text, but if you see the majority of programming requiring regex, you definitely need to put your hammer down and pick up a Makita.