[hbpm] Review of "Regular Expression Pocket Reference"

George Woolley george at metaart.org
Sun Oct 12 18:36:30 CDT 2003


One way to look at Perl
is as the best language for manipulating text.
At the center of what makes it so good for this is
   * the implementation of regular expressions
   * including how regular expressions are integrated
     with the rest of the language.
As far as I'm aware,
Perl has easily the best implementation of regular expressions around.

Long before Perl existed,
there were regular expressions in various Unix utitilites
such as grep, awk and sed.
The success of Perl has led to a great deal of attention
being placed on regular expressions.
Now there are also strong implementations in
Java, Javascript, Python, etc. 

The "Regular Expression Pocket Reference" by Tony Stubblebine
summarizes the current capabilities for regexes in
* GNU egrep, GNU awk, GNU sed, vi/vim
* Perl 5.8, Java, JavaScript, Python, etc.
* .NET, C#

I've found the book quite useful.
My review of it is at
   http://oakland.pm.org/reviews/regexppr.html

I'd be very interested in your thoughts on any of the following
* regular expressions
* the book
* my review of the book

George

 






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