RegEx in practice

This is a page dedicated to my talk "RegEx in practice". It is meant to illustrate how to apply regular expressions in practical usecases and tries to resolve confusions about them.

Thanks for that much participation. I updated the slides for the 6 errors. One other bug I discovered: I claimed a group which did not match is returned in python as empty string. No, it is actually None.

Topics

This is a technical talk and focuses on some aspects of practical computer science. It will focus on advanced elements of regular expressions.

• Usecase analysis
• Elements of regular expressions
• Resolving confusions
• RegEx engines
• RegEx for some practical usecases

Resources

Slides as PDF and slides archive

• Audio recording (OGG, 75 MB) [post-processed via Auphonic; thx!] of my talk from speaker's desk. Only meant to be used for rhetorics analysis, but you can have it if you want to.
• The three suggested links (accessed 27th of Nov 2014):
  • http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/, Russ Cox.
  • http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr18/, Unicode Consortium.
  • speakerdeck:unicode-regular-expression-engines, Nick Patch
• Most recently wordpress 4.0.1 fixed a severe security problem (most severe security vulnerability in WP since 2009 as they say). The problem originates from a faulty regular expression. Read about it from the bug reporters.
• CSS selector demonstration
• Python RegEx cheatsheet
• awk RegEx cheatsheet
• sed RegEx cheatsheet

Video

Want to see how I apply regular expressions in practice? Do you remember that faulty turingmachine visualization? It did not support Chrome so far, because -webkit- prefixed CSS instructions are missing. I fixed that problem using regular expressions. I am using the following command in vim:

Links

• BITS announcement
• Facebook event