5/28/2002 (c) 2002 Orbonyx Corp. All Rights Reserved.

GotDotNet – Building Upon the Framework

Roy Ogborn, Lead ConsultantOrbonyx Corp.

www.Orbonyx.comDownloads: www.Orbonyx.com/VS

E-mail: Roy @ Orbonyx.com

5/28/2002 (c) 2002 Orbonyx Corp. All Rights Reserved.

Regular Expressionsfor .NET Developers

GotDotNet – Building Upon the Framework

episode ten …

5/28/2002 (c) 2002 Orbonyx Corp. All Rights Reserved.

At the end of episode 10, you will …• Gain enough confidence with regular

expressions that you start using them in .NET

• Understand why some of your trials did not produce the results that you predicted

• Know which classes in the .NET framework to use for pattern matching

• Know how to begin performing complex find/replace operations in VS IDE

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Regular Expressions; What are you talking about?

• Unix’s grep – “Global Regular Expression Print.

• Unix’s awk command – for pattern scanning and processing

• Also a large component of PERL.

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I still don’t know what you are talking about…

• Regular Expressions is a programmer’s way of saying “patterns”.

• Used for finding pattern matches in strings.

• Also used for find/replace operations.

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To Visual Studio Example

5/28/2002

Scan web pages to find …

Links, e-mail addresses or content.

For example:

John West Salmon video

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Resources

• Daniel Appleman’s Regular Expressions with .NET (www.Desaware.com)

• http://regexlib.com/– Has loads of pre-built regular

expressions

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What we learned

•Regular Expressions go way beyond simple find and replace operations•They can be used for validating input, reformatting data, capturing information•Are fairly straight-forward to use in .NET … the trick is learning the RegEx language!

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Special Thanks to:

Daniel Applemanwww.Desaware.com

&

www.Apress.com

Joe Mayowww.csharp-station.com

5/28/2002 (c) 2002 Orbonyx Corp. All Rights Reserved.

Roy Ogborn, Lead ConsultantOrbonyx Corp.

www.Orbonyx.comDownloads: www.Orbonyx.com/VS

E-mail: Roy @ Orbonyx.com

Enjoy!