Idiot's guide to regular expressions?

[Graham Samuel]

Thanks Florian - the Quick Intro is the one for me - short and free!  
It approximates to an idiot's guide, although a text of the same  
length that was written with RunRev in mind would of course be ideal.

The book (quite expensive) appears to be much more of a in-depth  
study, and the review which praises its completeness and readability  
also suggests that it would take a long time to absorb, which is  
precisely what I'm trying to avoid.

It is odd in this day and age to have to deal with what amounts to a  
language (for an automaton) with no debugging features at all! Or  
perhaps I've got even that bit wrong.

Anyway I am now launched on yet another journey of discovery - thanks  
again.

Graham

On 28 Sep 2009, at 16:59:08 +0200, Florian von Walter  
<fvwalter at web.de> wrote:

> Graham,
>
> a very good tutorial and reference has always been "Mastering Regular
> Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl:
> http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596528126
> http://regex.info/
>
> This book explains how to use regular expressions and it also covers  
> the
> different styles of regular expressions.
>
> As far as I remember the PCRE implementation of regular expressions
> covers the Perl5 regex style so any decent introduction into Perl5- 
> style
> regular expressions will do it as well, for example:
> http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html (Reference Manual)
> http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html (Quick Intro)
> http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html (Longer Intro)
>
> Regards, Florian