Regular Expressions: The Complete Tutorial

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Regular Expressions The Complete Tutorial Jan Goyvaerts Regular Expressions: The Complete Tutorial Jan Goyvaerts Copyright 2006, 2007 Jan Goyvaerts. All rights reserved. Last updated July 2007. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author. This book is published exclusively at Every effort has been made to make this book as Complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied. The information is provided on an as is basis. The author and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book.

A regular expression (regex or regexp for short) is a special text string for describing a search pattern. You can think of regular expressions as wildcards on steroids. You are probably familiar with wildcard notations such as *.txt to find all text files in a file manager.

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