We aren’t going to concentrate on Ruby as a programming language much at the moment. What we are more concerned with at present are regular expressions. Regex is a language for describing languages. Regexes are used to build syntax highlighters and interpreters and compilers. They excel at helping you clean up noisy text data. They are used to ensure that user input conforms to certain syntactic rules. They turn grunt work into intellectual activity.
Let’s break down the pieces of regular expressions into three categories:
the elements, or what to match
the quantifiers, or how many to match
the anchors, or where to match
We will sift our fingers through regex by classifying some common expressions under these categories:
click for a random term...
Here’s your TODO list for next time:
Start the Regexercise homework. Due before February 15.
Run git pull template master to pull down some tweaks to the Regexercise PDF.