Designing Active Server Pages

Chapter 4. Regular Expressions, Classes, and Dynamic Evaluation and Execution

With the introduction of the VBScript 5.0 scripting engine, VBScript developers now have three very powerful techniques at their disposal which were previously unavailable with VBScript:

• The availability of a Regular Expression object, RegExp. Regular expressions provide for advanced string matching and parsing. If you are new to regular expressions, you’ll soon realize their tremendous advantages and wonder how you lived without them!

• The ability to create object-oriented code! VBScript now supports classes! I am very excited about this new feature, for it allows the creation of robust and reusable ASP pages. It’s also great for those working in large development teams where certain developers aren’t as experienced as others with ASP. The more experienced developers can create classes that encapsulate some of the more difficult functionality, and the more novice developers can simply use these classes to accomplish the common ASP tasks!

• Dynamic evaluation and execution. Dynamic evaluation allows a code snippet contained in a string to be evaluated as though it had been entered directly by the programmer creating the script. Dynamic execution allows a code snippet contained in a string to be executed as through it had been entered directly by the programmer. By employing the use of dynamic evaluation and execution, a script can achieve flexibility not previously available. We’ll discuss how to perform ...