6. Regular Expressions, Part I
Increasingly, the most sophisticated computer software deals with patterns— for example, speech patterns and the recognition of images. This chapter deals with the former: how to recognize patterns of words and characters. Although you can’t construct a human language translator with these techniques alone, they are a start.
That’s what regular expressions are for. A regular expression is a pattern you specify, using special characters to represent combinations of specified characters, digits, and words. It amounts to learning a new language, but it’s a relatively simple one, and once you learn it, this technology lets you to do a great deal in a small space—sometimes only a statement or two—that would otherwise ...
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