- Perl Compatible Regular Expression Cheat Sheet
- Sas Regular Expressions
- Perl Regular Expression Pdf
- Regular Expressions In Perl
@david, this cheat sheet is pretty neutral. The most common flavor is Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE). Javascript's engine is close to that and PHP also has Perl Compatible functions for Regex; they use the PREG prefix. Most everything on this sheet should be supported by PHP's engine (I think POSIX character classes are not). You'll be able to study them slowly, and to use them as a cheat sheet later, when you are reading the rest of the site or experimenting with your own regular expressions. If you overdose, make sure not to miss the next page, which comes back down to Earth and talks about some really cool stuff: The 1001 ways to use Regex.
A regular expression is a string of characters that define the pattern or patterns you are viewing. The syntax of regular expressions in Perl is very similar to what you will find within other regular expression.supporting programs, such as sed, grep, and awk. Perlre - Perl regular expressions #DESCRIPTION. This page describes the syntax of regular expressions in Perl. If you haven't used regular expressions before, a tutorial introduction is available in perlretut. If you know just a little about them, a quick-start introduction is available in perlrequick. Perl Cheat Sheet html (juerd.nl) Perl Quick Reference Card pdf (johnbokma.com) Perl Regular Expressions by Iain Truskett pdf (refcards.com) Perl Regular Expression - Quick Reference pdf Perl Predefined Variables (perl's special variable cheat sheet) by Peteris Krumins doc, pdf (catonmat.net) Perl pack/unpack Summary (perl's pack.
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In the previous article we saw how regular characters match themselves and how dot . can match any character.
A character class is something in between those two extremes. A character class is a list of characters that can be matched.
The list is placed in square brackets [].
For example [abc] will match either 'a' or 'b' or 'c'.
Just as a regular character or a . can match exactly one character so does a character class. Later we are going to learnabout quantifiers that will allow us to say how many of something we would like to match, but for now remember that a characterclass always matches exactly one character. If it cannot fulfill the match then the whole regex matching fails.
So what if we have a bunch of strings and we would like to make sure only strings containing any of the following will match?#a#, #b#, #c#, #d#, #e#, #f#, #@# or #.#That is, we would like the string to have a # character, followed by 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', '@', or '.', followed by another #character. (We are using # in this example in order to get you used to seeing 'strange' characters that have no special meaning.)
Photoshop for free on mac. The regex that will match those looks like this: /#[abcdef@.]#/.
It says: match a #, then match any one(!) of the characters in the square bracket, then match another #.
this will match
but will not match any of the following:
Two notes:
- The regex won't match '##' or '#ab#' because the character class must match exactly one character between the two '#' characters.
- The '.' inside the character class lost its special meaning of 'everything except newline' and can match a single '.' only.
In general, most special characters lose their special meaning inside a character class, but there are of course exceptions.There are even character that gain special meaning inside a character class.
Range in a character class
Programmers are lazy typing in all the characters between 'a' and 'f' in the regex /#[abcdef@.]#/ was really tiring. If we had to typein all the characters between 'a' and 'z' that would be even worse and it would be very error-prone. What if I miss one of the characters?Instead of that regexes allow us to define a range of characters from the ASCII table using a dash (-). The previous regexcould be written as /#[a-f@.]#/
So as you can see a dash -, that did not have any special meaning outside of a character class, inside has the special 'range-making' meaning.
Of course you will then want to know how can you express that one of the characters you'd like to match in the character class is a dash, and the answeris that if you place the dash as the first or the last character in the character class, then it will be just a plain dash.So /#[a-f@.-]#/ will match all the above and also '#-#'.
Another frequently asked question at this point is how to include a closing square bracket ] in a character class. That's simple too.You just need to 'escape' it be preceding with a back-slash: ].
Negated character class
What if we would like to allow the matching of any character between two '#' characters except 'a', 'b', or 'c'? We would need to constructa character class with all the characters in the world and Unicode has more that 110,000 characters.That would be a lot of work to type in. Instead of that, Perl allows us to negate a character class. If we put a Caret (^) as the first character in the character class it will mean the character class can match any one character except those mentioned in the character class.So [^abc] would match exactly one character that is not 'a', nor 'b', nor 'c'. Our full regex then would look like /#[^abc]#/.
This regex will match these strings:
Perl Compatible Regular Expression Cheat Sheet
but will not match any of these strings:
Note, it won't match the string '##' or the string '#xyz#', because the negated character class still has to match exactly one character.
Summary
Published on 2014-11-09
Comments
In the comments, please wrap your code snippets within <pre> </pre> tags and use spaces for indentation.Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.comments powered by DisqusSummary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use the MySQL REGEXP operator to perform complex searches based on regular expressions.
Introduction to regular expressions
A regular expression is a special string that describes a search pattern. It is a powerful tool that gives you a concise and flexible way to identify strings of text e.g., characters, and words, based on patterns.
For example, you can use regular expressions to search for email, IP address, phone number, social security number, or anything that has a specific pattern.
A regular expression uses its own syntax that can be interpreted by a regular expression processor. A regular expression is widely used in almost platforms from programming languages to databases including MySQL.
The advantage of using regular expression is that you are not limited to search for a string based on a fixed pattern with the percent sign (%) and underscore (_) in the LIKE
operator. The regular expressions have more meta-characters to construct flexible patterns.
The disadvantage of using regular expression is that it is quite difficult to understand and maintain such a complicated pattern. Therefore, you should describe the meaning of the regular expression in the comment of the SQL statement. In addition, the speed of data retrieval, in some cases, is decreased if you use complex patterns in a regular expression.
The abbreviation of regular expressions is regex or regexp.
MySQL REGEXP operator
MySQL adapts the regular expression implemented by Henry Spencer. MySQL allows you to match pattern right in the SQL statements by using REGEXP
operator.
The following illustrates the syntax of the REGEXP
operator in the WHERE
clause:
This statement performs a pattern match of a string_column
against a pattern
.
If a value in the string_column
matches the pattern
, the expression in the WHERE
clause returns true, otherwise it returns false.
If either string_column
or pattern
is NULL
, the result is NULL
.
In addition to the REGEXP
operator, you can use the RLIKE
operator, which is the synonym of the REGEXP
operator.
The negation form of the REGEXP
operator is NOT REGEXP
.
MySQL REGEXP examples
Suppose you want to find all products whose last names start with character A, B or C. You can use a regular expression in the following SELECT
statement:
The pattern allows you to find the product whose name begins with A, B, or C.
- The character ^ means to match from the beginning of the string.
- The character | means to search for alternatives if one fails to match.
The following table illustrates some commonly used metacharacters and constructs in a regular expression.
To find products whose names start with the character a
, you use the metacharacter '^'
to match at the beginning of the name:
If you want the REGEXP
operator to compare strings in case-sensitive fashion, you can use the BINARY operator to cast a string to a binary string.
Because MySQL compares binary strings byte by byte rather than character by character. This allows the string comparison to be case sensitive.
For example, the following statement matches only uppercase 'C'
at the beginning of the product name.
Sas Regular Expressions
To find the product whose name ends with f, you use 'f$'
to match the end of a string.
To find the product whose name contains the word 'ford'
, you use the following query:
Perl Regular Expression Pdf
To find the product whose name contains exactly 10 characters, you use ‘^'
and ‘$
to match the beginning and end of the product name, and repeat {10}
times of any character ‘.'
in between as shown in the following query:
Regular Expressions In Perl
In this tutorial, you have learned how to query data using the MySQL REGEXP operator with regular expressions.