The Puzzling Quirks of Regular Expressions

  1. Acknowledgments
  2. Rights of (Wo)Man
  3. Credits
  4. Preface
  5. Quantifiers and Special Sub-Patterns
    1. Wildcard Scope
    2. Words and Sequences
    3. Endpoint Classes
    4. A Configuration Format
    5. The Human Genome
  6. Pitfalls and Sand in the Gears
    1. Catastrophic Backtracking
    2. Playing Dominoes
    3. Advanced Dominoes
    4. Sensor Art
  7. Creating Functions using Regexen
    1. Reimplementing str.count()
    2. Reimplementing str.count() (stricter)
    3. Finding a Name for a Function
    4. Playing Poker (Part 1)
    5. Playing Poker (Part 2)
    6. Playing Poker (Part 3)
    7. Playing Poker (Part 4)
    8. Playing Poker (Part 5)
  8. Easy, Difficult, and Impossible Tasks
    1. Identifying Equal Counts
    2. Matching Before Duplicate Words
    3. Testing an IPv4 Address
    4. Matching a Numeric Sequence
    5. Matching the Fibonacci Sequence
    6. Matching the Prime Numbers
    7. Matching Relative Prime Numbers

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Pitfalls and Sand in the Gears

As compact and expressive as regular expressions can be, there are times when they simply go disastrously wrong. Be careful to avoid pitfalls, and at least to understand and identify where such difficulties arise.