Java 9 Regular Expressions: A hands-on guide to implement zero-length assertions, back-references, quantifiers, and many more

by Anubhava Srivastava

Regular expressions are a powerful tool in the programmer's toolbox and allow pattern matching. They are also used for manipulating text and data. This book will provide you with the know-how (and practical examples) to solve real-world problems using regex in Java. You will begin by discovering what regular expressions are and how they work with Java. This easy-to-follow guide is a great place from which to familiarize yourself with the core concepts of regular expressions and to master its implementation with the features of Java 9. You will learn how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns. You will learn when and where to apply the methods for finding patterns in digits, letters, Unicode characters, and string literals. Going forward, you will learn to use zero-length assertions and lookarounds, parsing the source code, and processing the log files. Finally, you will master tips, tricks, and best practices in regex with Java. Anubhava Srivastava has more than 22 years of professional experience in architecture, design, and software development. He specializes mainly in the J2EE technology stack, web technologies, CICD, test-driven development, and AWS cloud-based development. He is an active contributor to the Stack Overflow community. He currently stands in the top 35 users in terms of reputations out of the 7.5 million Stack Overflow users. He is passionate about regular expressions and is always willing to sharpen his regex skills further. He has answered close to 10,000 regex questions on Stack Overflow. He has authored and released a test-driven framework, called GenericFixture, for FitNesse as an open source software. You can follow him on Twitter at @anubhava.

158 pages, Paperback

Published July 25, 2017

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my data structures course I saw that every assignment had to deal with manipulating strings so I picked this book up. Despite the fact that this was written for Java 9, I never ran into anything that I couldn't use. Even as a computer engineer I find myself working with strings a lot and they're hard to work with. I've never quite felt like I had the adequate tools to do so. Regular expressions are powerful, but if you don't know how to use them properly they can be like taking a hatchet to your data. This book teaches by example and can easily be held in your hands as it's only 100 pages.

If you're looking for learning how to get started with regular expressions this book is invaluable. If you want to learn about how to begin thinking about solving the predecessor problem this book is missing that. Maybe it's better for that because it will actually get read widely. This book should be read widely, regular expressions are your friends.