Preface

Scripting and automation tasks often need to extract particular portions of text from input data or modify them from one format to another. This book will help you understand Regular Expressions, a mini-programming language for all sorts of text processing needs.

This book heavily leans on examples to present features of regular expressions one by one. It is recommended that you manually type each example and experiment with them. Make an effort to understand the sample input as well as the solution presented and check if the output changes (or not!) when you alter some part of the input and the command. As an analogy, consider learning to drive a car — no matter how much you read about them or listen to explanations, you'd need practical experience to become proficient.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with programming basics. You should also have a working knowledge of Ruby syntax and features like string formats, string and Enumerable methods.

You are also expected to get comfortable with reading manuals, searching online, visiting external links provided for further reading, tinkering with illustrated examples, asking for help when you are stuck and so on. In other words, be proactive and curious instead of just consuming the content passively.

If you have prior experience with a programming language, but new to Ruby, check out the official quickstart guide.

Conventions

  • The examples presented here have been tested with Ruby version 3.3.0 and includes features not available in earlier versions.
  • Code snippets shown are copy pasted from the irb --simple-prompt shell and modified for presentation purposes. Some commands are preceded by comments to provide context and explanations. Blank lines have been added to improve readability. nil return value is not shown for puts statements. Error messages are shortened. And so on.
  • Unless otherwise noted, all examples and explanations are meant for ASCII characters.
  • External links are provided throughout the book for you to explore certain topics in more depth.
  • The Ruby_Regexp repo has all the code snippets used in examples, exercises and other details related to the book. Solutions file is also provided. If you are not familiar with the git command, click the Code button on the webpage to get the files.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Allen Downey. An attempt at translating his book Think Python to Think Ruby gave me the confidence to publish my own book.

Feedback and Errata

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

You can reach me via:

Author info

Sundeep Agarwal is a lazy being who prefers to work just enough to support his modest lifestyle. He accumulated vast wealth working as a Design Engineer at Analog Devices and retired from the corporate world at the ripe age of twenty-eight. Unfortunately, he squandered his savings within a few years and had to scramble trying to earn a living. Against all odds, selling programming ebooks saved his lazy self from having to look for a job again. He can now afford all the fantasy ebooks he wants to read and spends unhealthy amount of time browsing the internet.

When the creative muse strikes, he can be found working on yet another programming ebook (which invariably ends up having at least one example with regular expressions). Researching materials for his ebooks and everyday social media usage drowned his bookmarks, so he maintains curated resource lists for sanity sake. He is thankful for free learning resources and open source tools. His own contributions can be found at https://github.com/learnbyexample.

List of books: https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Code snippets are available under MIT License.

Resources mentioned in Acknowledgements section above are available under original licenses.

Book version

3.0

See Version_changes.md to track changes across book versions.