Regular expressions are essentially matchers. They're especially useful for verifying input, and for things like online filters.
For instance, let's say I wanted to know if the user submitted a valid united states phone number in the format ###-###-####. I could easy verify with this expression: \d\d\d-\d\d\d-\d\d\d\d
I could make this a little more readable: \d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}
(The \d means "digit" and the {#} means "repeated this many times")
Let's try another one, which will try to block the S-word and some of it's variants: [sS5]+[hH]+[iI1]+[tT7]+
(The [...] means "any of these letters" and the + means "at least once in a row")
So this regex would match "Sh17" and "sHi7" and "SssshII1It" which is extremely useful for places like online forums which need to be kid-friendly.
There's more complex regular expressions for stuff like websites, which allows you to do something like:
Its all clear to me now, so id there some kind of glossary containing all these expressions?
or how did you know d is for digits and [...] means any of these letters?
Regular expressions are essentially matchers. They're especially useful for verifying input, and for things like online filters.
For instance, let's say I wanted to know if the user submitted a valid united states phone number in the format ###-###-####. I could easy verify with this expression:
\d\d\d-\d\d\d-\d\d\d\dI could make this a little more readable:
\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}(The \d means "digit" and the {#} means "repeated this many times")
Let's try another one, which will try to block the S-word and some of it's variants:
[sS5]+[hH]+[iI1]+[tT7]+(The
[...]means "any of these letters" and the+means "at least once in a row")So this regex would match "Sh17" and "sHi7" and "SssshII1It" which is extremely useful for places like online forums which need to be kid-friendly.
There's more complex regular expressions for stuff like websites, which allows you to do something like:
That's some quick code that, given a regular expression that matches websites, will replace every instance of the website with a link to the website!
Its all clear to me now, so id there some kind of glossary containing all these expressions?
or how did you know d is for digits and [...] means any of these letters?
If you Google "regex cheat sheet" there's plenty out there! Each languages implementation of regexes are a little different though.
Here's a nice one gist.github.com/vitorbritto/9ff58e...
Thank you very much.