I'm excited to announce that I've recently started working on a regular expression book for O'Reilly Media. The back story is that a few months ago, Jeffrey Friedl (author of the world's best regular expression book yet ) was kind enough to introduce me to his editor at O'Reilly, Andy Oram. After Andy and I [...]

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A few months ago Ben Nadel (a regex fan and prominent ColdFusion blogger) asked me if I was interested in promoting his idea for a "National Regular Expression Day," where he'd give away some shirts and books and basically just have some fun with regex evangelism. Well, Ben finally kicked if off, assigning the honor [...]

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Here's a neat little trick I came up with for removing nested patterns from a string. var str = "abc<1<2<>3>4>def"; while (str != (str = str.replace(/<[^<>]*>/g, ""))); // str -> "abcdef" Notice that the regex in this one-liner doesn't try to deal with nested patterns at all. The while loop's condition replaces instances of <…> [...]

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Cüneyt Yılmaz's JRX is a cool JavaScript regex tester inspired by the RX tool of Komodo IDE. Cüneyt recently added my XRegExp library to his tester, so JRX is now a nice and easy way to test XRegExp's singleline and extended modes, as well as named capture and other XRegExp-provided syntax. Check it out! As [...]

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Update: This version of XRegExp is outdated. See XRegExp.com for the latest, greatest version. If you haven't seen the prior versions, XRegExp is an MIT-licensed JavaScript library that provides an augmented, cross-browser implementation of regular expressions, including support for additional modifiers and syntax. Several convenience methods and a new, powerful recursive-construct parser that uses regex [...]

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