Regular Expression Resources
Regular Expression for everybody
A lot of programmers that came from the mainframe world are unfamiliar with Regular Expression (regex). Here are some resources that will help you build a skill or reinforce what you know.
- Regular-Expressions.info
- This site by the author of Regular Expressions: The Complete Tutorial offers tutorials, examples, and more.
- Sun Regular Expressions Tutorial
- Sun tutorial on using regex in Java.
- Learning .NET Regular Expressions with Expresso
- Learn the basics in 30 minutes? Maybe a bit longer but worth it.
Double escape clause
When confusing things happen to smart people
I must have had 10 questions on escape characters in Java in the last six weeks. Most of them were experienced folks that were project hopping and ran into an unexpected problem. In the end, they just missed some basics in the way languages handle escape characters. Here are a couple traps that caught the distracted.
Replacing scriptlets with expression language
Old dog looking for new way to do same old tricks
Some times new technologies seem to be created just to make the experienced people feel old. I noticed that some of the folks that were cutting edge when JSPs were introduced have been slow to embrace Expression Language (EL). I have to admit that after years of using it, I still find myself falling back to scriptlets when I'm prototyping. This is mostly because I already know how to write Java and taking the time to think in tags just slows me down.