Regular expressions primer for a newbie

[stevetimko]

I've been using UltraEdit for several years to do basic data munging. I've never taken the plunge, though, to learn regular expressions. I bought the O'Reilly computer book on regular expressions and it's not for a newbie like me.
Any suggestions on how I can get started?

[mrainey56]

Here's a good place to start.

Remember, UE only has a subset of the regex capabilities you'll run into in discussions and books.


http://regexadvice.com/

[Captain]

Check out Active Perl and the perlmonks.com website. There is plenty there to go on.
Good luck.

[mjcarman]

I've never taken the plunge, though, to learn regular expressions. I bought the O'Reilly computer book on regular expressions and it's not for a newbie like me. Any suggestions on how I can get started?

You bought Mastering Regular Expressions? Good book, but definately not a tutorial!

First, pick your dialect. I recommend Perl as it's kind of the "gold standard" for regular expressions. Mofi is a big fan of UE's syntax, but you can't use it anywhere else. Perl's syntax derives from Unix, and most other implementations (JavaScript, Ruby, etc.) are very similar.

If you have Perl installed, there is lots of documentation in the perlre, perlrequick, and perlretut manpages. If you don't have Perl installed, you can find the docs online at http://perldoc.perl.org.

[tmaloney]

A useful tool is the RegEx Coach. Download from here: http://weitz.de/regex-coach

[whatchamccallum]

I am trying to get into RegEx searches I have tried the regex search of T(hread?|ask?)

However UltraEdit doesn't find any match and the text I am searching has both the work Thread and Task listed.

any ideas?

It worked with regex-coach

[tmaloney]

Set your Regular Expression Engine to Perl compatible.

To get there:
Advanced | Configuration | Search | Regular Expression Engine

[whatchamccallum]

I just found out that it would work much better if I upgrade to v12 on my laptop =)

Thank you that did it

[Rochesterbud]

go to

http://www.editpadpro.com/manual/EditPadPro.pdf

look at Regex tutorial beginning on page 78..You can print it out

Independent of the fact that it from a competitor of UE32, this tutorial is a labor of love and is also available as a book

http://www.regular-expressions.info/print.html

Bud