I've put off understanding regex for many, many years...so many that I had resigned myself to forever using a service to create them whenever a project or script made it necessary to do so. Brett was able to break through my wall of fear and doubt with his walk through the literal and metas in conjunction with his visual guides. I finally understand greediness and really a lot on why I was so terrible at regex in the first place.
His examples were apropo, relevant to anyone working on the web; while the ramp up to backreferences was steep, I highly recommend the presentation for thosedevelopers who want to strengthen their toolset with a formal understanding regex whom may have put it off for one reason or another.
Really well paced talk, with good examples. I liked the 'goal' starting each section, and then working towards it. I felt like I understood greediness and lookaheads/behinds properly, for the first time. Also the alternative delimiter trick for php was handy.
Some comments:
- it might have been good to compare scraping html with regexp vs a DOM object - my first thought with the Amazon form example would be to use a DOM object.
- personally I'd have really liked more time on the later sections (from about 5 onwards) - perhaps we could request a follow up talk covering the some of the homework items (unicode, passive groups, more on lookaheads) and other more advanced regexp-ey stuff?
- when you mentioned the alternative delimiter (%) for php, you could mention the javascript RegExp constructor function that lets you lose the delimiter.
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Technical difficulties aside, in-depth, informative talk. All in an approachable manner for regex relative neophytes.
Brett has an easy-going presentation on learning regex. I really appreciated the real-world, as opposed to hello-world, examples. Well done!
I've been wrangling RegEx all day, so this was perfect timing for the talk. Thank you!
Good info, and some real gems I didn't know (or didn't realize how to actually use them!).
Hey Brett:
Great job, I am actually looking forward to using more REGEX now...and thanks for the links to the tools as well.
I've put off understanding regex for many, many years...so many that I had resigned myself to forever using a service to create them whenever a project or script made it necessary to do so. Brett was able to break through my wall of fear and doubt with his walk through the literal and metas in conjunction with his visual guides. I finally understand greediness and really a lot on why I was so terrible at regex in the first place.
His examples were apropo, relevant to anyone working on the web; while the ramp up to backreferences was steep, I highly recommend the presentation for thosedevelopers who want to strengthen their toolset with a formal understanding regex whom may have put it off for one reason or another.
Really well paced talk, with good examples. I liked the 'goal' starting each section, and then working towards it. I felt like I understood greediness and lookaheads/behinds properly, for the first time. Also the alternative delimiter trick for php was handy.
Some comments:
- it might have been good to compare scraping html with regexp vs a DOM object - my first thought with the Amazon form example would be to use a DOM object.
- personally I'd have really liked more time on the later sections (from about 5 onwards) - perhaps we could request a follow up talk covering the some of the homework items (unicode, passive groups, more on lookaheads) and other more advanced regexp-ey stuff?
- when you mentioned the alternative delimiter (%) for php, you could mention the javascript RegExp constructor function that lets you lose the delimiter.