On 05/14/2018, at 22:15, Matthew London <mlon...@gmail.com <mailto:mlon...@gmail.com>> wrote: > PS.Grateful if someone can recommend a "GREP for non-programmers" written in > plain(er) English so I don't have to bother you very helpful people here.
Hey Matthew, It takes a while to get good enough with regular expressions to manage anything but the basics without a hint or two, but don't let that worry you – Practice makes Progress. It's been awhile, since I updated this – but all the links are current. -- Best Regards, Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some Information on Learning Regular Expressions – by Christopher C. Stone ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Learning basic regular expressions is relatively easy. Becoming really good with them takes dedication, a lot of practice, and some tutelage. The BBEdit Manual devotes a whole chapter to regular expressions: Searching with Grep (currently chapter 8). It's a reference rather than a tutorial, but it does explain at least briefly many of the fundamentals. My cheat-sheet for BBEdit is up on Gist: https://gist.github.com/ccstone/5385334 <https://gist.github.com/ccstone/5385334> BBEdit uses PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), so it's a pretty decent if not complete reference. Regex neophytes are better off starting with a book specifically written for beginners. I have these books (in addition to a couple of tomes on Perl): "Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes" by Ben Forta "Beginning Regular Expressions" by Andrew Watt "Regular Expressions Cookbook" by Jan Goyvaerts and Steven Levithan "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl (Advanced) There's a decent little utility available on the App-Store called 'Patterns' that live-updates as you create your pattern. ($2.99) https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/patterns-the-regex-app/id429449079?mt=12 <https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/patterns-the-regex-app/id429449079?mt=12> I've found it very handy to have live feedback when building a complex pattern and wish I'd had something like that when I started learning regex more than 20 years ago. Extracting a good working knowledge of regular expressions from the Internet is a serious chore. There are many flavors of regex out there, such as Perl/PCRE, Java, Javascript, Ruby, Python, TCL... They're all similar, but the differences can be very confusing and frustrating. Nevertheless there are many useful online resources. Here are a few: http://www.agillo.net/regex-primer-part-1/ <http://www.agillo.net/regex-primer-part-1/> http://www.agillo.net/regex-primer-part-2/ <http://www.agillo.net/regex-primer-part-2/> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/regextutorial.aspx <http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/regextutorial.aspx> http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html <http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tags: @Learning, @Regular, @Expressions, @Regular_Expressions, @RegEx, @GREP, @Info ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- This is the BBEdit Talk public discussion group. If you have a feature request or would like to report a problem, please email "supp...@barebones.com" rather than posting to the group. Follow @bbedit on Twitter: <http://www.twitter.com/bbedit> --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BBEdit Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to bbedit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to bbedit@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/bbedit.
