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Regex 101

By Bradley Andersen (‎elohmrow‎) from Purdue.pm
Date: Saturday, 23 August 2014 10:00
Duration: 50 minutes
Target audience: Beginner
Language: English
Tags: 101 expressions meat regex regular unicorn

You can find more information on the speaker's site:

• Abstract: http://pvnp.us/yapc::eu/2014/regex101/abstract.html
• Talk: http://pvnp.us/yapc::eu/2014/regex101/yapc_eu_2014_regex101.ppt

This talk is done. The slides that were used may be found here:

http://pvnp.us/yapc::eu/2014/regex101/yapc_eu_2014_regex101.ppt

MJ was a ColdFusion Developer. One day, MJ’s boss asked him to turn 3,000 badly-formatted text files into a single, valid spreadsheet.

MJ thought and thought and thought about this: “What will I do?”, he wondered aloud.

Reggie is a Perl Programmer. While MJ was beating his head into their shared cube wall, contemplating an early retirement to his van down by the river, Reggie, as all Perl Programmers are wont to do, kindly offered to help: “Hey, MJ - need some help?”

MJ spewed about how he had these _thousands_ of files to parse, how they were scraped from a web site where, apparently, people had no idea about how to properly format HTML, and how he was just asked, as if he were a Grand Old Magician, to magically transform this pile of inconsistent doody into gold. He had started to bald - that’s right, the thought of trying to do this in ColdFusion made the man bald.

Reggie sensed an opening. He stood up, straightened out his ‘Geology Rocks!’ hoodie, waltzed the three steps to MJ’s cube, put his hand on his chest, and said, in his best Antonio Banderas: “My friend, _I_ will help you!”

Do _you_ want to be like Reggie? Of course you do - we all do.

How can you be like Reggie? Come to my Basic Regular Expressions talk. You will learn a little about how Perl actually processes regular expressions, you’ll see how that compares to how people _think_ Perl processes regular expressions. You’ll get a couple real-world projects to work on, you’ll learn some tricks, and, you may even win a prize. More on the prize later.

Come to my Basic Regular Expressions talk. Or go bald. Your choice.