Learn Regular Expressions in 100 minutes.

Ever been in a situation where you are:

  • Looking for a needle in a haystack ?
  • Looking for a certain tree in the forest?

IT professionals are in such situations all the time when it comes to LOG files.

LOG files in this business are everywhere, in development, in testing and especially in production. You keep looking for error message and extract performance statistics from LOG files !

Well Regular Expressions is there to help you find your needle or tree.  It is a unique way to find TEXT PATTERNS in single lines or paragraphs.

If the you are still reading this so far,  then I got your attention. Please use my tutorial to learn about Regular expressions.

The slides in this Tutorial are prepared with certain considerations in Mind:

  1. They can be used as a tutorial for yourself and your colleagues in around 100 minutes .
  2. They could serve as a desktop quick guide for Regualr expressions.

You will find a complete list of my tutorials, here.

The tutorial is available here in PDF, HTML and Adobe-Flash Formats

Contents:

  • Introduction to patterns and meta characters.
  • Gradual explanation of complex patterns.
  • Using RE in various platforms:
    • Using Regular Expressions in perl, VBS and Oracle.
    • Short guide to grep ,awk and sed.
  • Greedy vs ungreedy.
  • Assertions.

A quick Flash version  below:

Hope it is useful.

  • By foo, November 28, 2010 @ 08:10

    you got greedy and “non greedy” backwards.
    greedy -> matches longest path; /a.*a/
    non-greedy -> matches shortest path; /a.*?a/

  • By Ahmed Maklad, November 28, 2010 @ 13:34

    Thank you “foo”, I will check and fix it if necessary.

Other links to this post

  1. Learn vi in 100 minutes. at MakSoft Blog