As an application developer or Web developer, no doubt you've done some pretty heavy string manipulating or searching at some point in your career. You may have written hundreds of lines of code to search for characters and make replacements.

Does an easier way exist? Yes. Enter regular expressions, a concise and powerful way of searching and replacing strings. "Ah, but I've heard of regular expressions," you say. "They're for magic folk and code wizards."

Not so. Regular expressions aren't as mystical as they look, and the focus of this book is to provide you with all the regular expressions you could ever need, ready to plug in and go. I also break the code down and explain it character by character, allowing you to learn by example.

This book includes 100 recipes demonstrated in complete examples written in Perl, PHP, Python, grep, sed, and Vim. These recipes are ready for you to use in your applications-whether it be validating a U.S. postal code (recipe 4-18), searching for words within code comments (recipe 6-9), or finding bad CSV records in a file (recipe 3-1).

If you're a developer, or if you use the command line or Vim and don't enjoy struggling with regular expressions, this book is for you. You'll get the recipes you need, generate ideas for new strings, gain a complete understanding of how to build regular expressions, and save tons of time along the way!