December 2006
Intermediate to advanced
1312 pages
35h 17m
English
Content preview from Windows Developer Power Tools
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6.6 Mastering Regular Expressions with the Regulator
Regular expressions are among the most mysterious and black-art-like technologies for developers. Mastering them can yield amazing results and productivity gains, but they’re hard to learn, and regex syntax is often very cryptic.
Using regular expressions in your applications is often not as trivial a task as you would like, because you need to make sure the expressions actually work and do what you expect them to. This testing is usually done manually, and cycling between developing the expression in your language of choice, compiling a test harness, and running it to check the expression’s operation can take up a significant amount of time.
The Regulator, built by Roy Osherove, is designed to eliminate (or at least reduce) this time-stealing phase. The Regulator allows you to create your regular expressions in an environment similar to an IDE. Among other things, it allows:
Previewing the results of running your expression on a specific set of inputs
Syntax highlighting in the regex editing pane
Searching for common expressions online using RegExLib.com’s web services from within an application
Importing expressions that you find suitable into your editing pane
Tip
You can read more about regular expressions in the article “Introduction to Regular Expressions,” also by Roy Osherove, which you can find online at http://dotnetweblogs.com/rosherove/story/6863.aspx.
The Regulator at a Glance | |
|---|---|
Tool | The Regulator |
Version covered | 2.0.3 |
Home page ... | |
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
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.