July 2014
Intermediate to advanced
820 pages
17h 6m
English
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Chapter 23. Regular Expressions
Introduction
Regular expressions are an intricate and powerful tool for matching patterns and manipulating text. Though not as fast as plain-vanilla string matching, regular expressions are extremely flexible. They allow you to construct patterns to match almost any conceivable combination of characters with a simple—albeit terse and punctuation-studded—grammar. If your website relies on data feeds that come in text files—data feeds like sports scores, news articles, or frequently updated headlines—regular expressions can help you make sense of them.
This chapter gives a brief overview of basic regular expression syntax and then focuses on the functions that PHP provides for working with regular expressions. For a bit more detailed information about the ins and outs of regular expressions, check out the PCRE section of the PHP online manual and Appendix B of Learning PHP 5 by David Sklar (O’Reilly). To start on the path to regular expression wizardry, read the comprehensive Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl (O’Reilly).
Regular expressions are handy when transforming plain text into HTML, and vice versa. Luckily, because these are such helpful subjects, PHP has many built-in functions to handle these tasks, explained by recipes in other chapters. Preventing Cross-Site Scripting tells how to escape HTML entities; Removing HTML and PHP Tags covers stripping HTML tags; Recipes and show how to convert plain text to HTML and HTML to plain ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.