If you are a practitioner of regular expressions, you may be knowing, how easy it makes your life while dealing with pattern of strings. Regular Expressions is one topic, I feel, everyone in the software industry –who is even remotely related to programming- should gain mastery over. I can’t tell you enough, how many times regular expressions have came to my rescue.

regular-expressions

Smashing Magazine, yesterday published an interesting article on advanced usage for regular expressions.  Though the syntax they have used is PHP-Perl compatible but (after some minor changes in syntax) you can use it for VB Scripting needs as well. The underlying concepts behind reg-ex pretty much remains the same for all programming languages.

They have divided the topic into eight sub headings

  1. Greediness/Laziness
  2. Back Referencing: is a way to refer to previously matched patterns inside a regular expression. (One of my favorites)
  3. Named Groups
  4. Word Boundaries
  5. Atomic Groups
  6. Recursion
  7. Call backs
  8. Commenting

Check out the article here.

Also, check our earlier article on basics of regular expressions. For related questions, visit reg-ex forums.