I want to talk a little bit about regular expressions or regex. I understand that there is a lot of power in regex, but with great power comes and unfathomable layer of complexity. And it's complexity in the sense that you can build an expression that works in most of the situations you want it to, but not all. Or it will work in all of the situations you want it to and in a bunch of them that you don't. Another reality that makes this all even more difficult is that regex is good at some pretty specific things. It's not like I write code everyday...or even every month that requires a regex, so I really can't stay sharp. To top off this little quandary, not all implementations of regex are identical.
Are you a .NET developer? Stay tuned for a special treat near the end of this article.
Let's say you need to verify inputs (e.g. an email address is an email address). You could certainly create something that looks for some characters, an @, followed by some more characters, a period, followed by some .com, .gov, .edu, .org. But it will likely be a very horrendous method and frankly, it's code you don't need to spend your time writing if you use a regex validation. For the sake of this article, let's just agree and move on to the next problem. If you're not already familiar with regex, how do you create a regex that can verify an email address format? You could create a bunch of unit tests and make sure your regex checks all the inputs. That's a bit time consuming.
First, I want to recommend a product for the .NET developers out there called RegexHero. It has been one of my favorite tools over the last couple years. Not only does it allow you to test your regex against text you're currently working with, it also generates your .NET code in C# or VB so you can incorporate your regex gracefully into your code once you have tested it. I can't express how much I love this app, but I can make a gesture of support.
Submit your name and a contact email address for one of 5 RegexHero licenses I'll be giving away at the end of June.
Are you a .NET developer? Stay tuned for a special treat near the end of this article.
Let's say you need to verify inputs (e.g. an email address is an email address). You could certainly create something that looks for some characters, an @, followed by some more characters, a period, followed by some .com, .gov, .edu, .org. But it will likely be a very horrendous method and frankly, it's code you don't need to spend your time writing if you use a regex validation. For the sake of this article, let's just agree and move on to the next problem. If you're not already familiar with regex, how do you create a regex that can verify an email address format? You could create a bunch of unit tests and make sure your regex checks all the inputs. That's a bit time consuming.
First, I want to recommend a product for the .NET developers out there called RegexHero. It has been one of my favorite tools over the last couple years. Not only does it allow you to test your regex against text you're currently working with, it also generates your .NET code in C# or VB so you can incorporate your regex gracefully into your code once you have tested it. I can't express how much I love this app, but I can make a gesture of support.
Submit your name and a contact email address for one of 5 RegexHero licenses I'll be giving away at the end of June.
