CFUNITED 2007: Regular Expressions with Michael Dinowitz

MIchael's presentation was an excellent crash course in regular expressions. He hit the main points and generated quite a bit of interest in the class. In fact, there were even people sitting on the floor.

The main points that I gathered from the class where that regular expressions:

• Matches patterns of characters
• Non-special characters are matched literally in the expression
• A period is a control character that matches ANY other character.
• A collection of non-control characters matches another collection of non-control characters
• Using the caret (^) will ensure that you are matching at the start of the string, whereas using the dollar sign, will ensure that you are matching at the end of the string
• RegEx ranges of characters (the range is defined by the list of ascii character in their numerical order (such as at AsciiTable.com) and used in side a set of square brackets ( [ ] )
• Multipliers allow you to match anywhere between 0-n, or 1-n or anything in between of a set of expressions
• Finally, Michael talked about a couple of other things such as POSIX expressions, that are a little more readable.