After reading positive reviews about the second edition it since I started using regular expressions a little over a year ago, I finally purchased O'Reilly Media's Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl, since I discovered that a third edition came out in August 2006. The book arrived today, and it is indeed pretty […]

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Excited by the fact that I can mimic atomic groups when using most regex libraries which don't support them, I set my sights on another of my most wanted features which is commonly lacking: conditionals (which provide an if-then-else construct). Of the regex libraries I'm familiar with, conditionals are only supported by .NET, Perl, PCRE […]

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So, I was messing around with RegexBuddy and discovered that capturing groups work inside lookarounds (e.g., "(?=(captured))"), even though, of course, lookarounds only match a position. Consider that by using this technique, you can return text to your application (using backreferences) which wasn't contained within your actual match (backreference zero)! Thinking back to the regex […]

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On a regular expression forum I visit every once in awhile, a user asked how he could match all innermost tables within HTML source code. In other words, he wanted to match all tables which did not contain other tables. The regex should match <table>…</table>, but should only match the inner table within <table>…<table>…</table>…</table>. This […]

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