Understanding JavaScript RegExp

About

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 learn JavaScript Regular Expressions, a mini-programming language for all sorts of text processing needs.

The 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.

Exercises are included to test your understanding. Reference solutions are also provided.

Promo video

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with programming basics. You should also have a working knowledge of JavaScript syntax and functional programming concepts like map and filter.

You are also expected to get comfortable with reading documentation, 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.

Testimonials

Literally was having a mini-breakdown about not understanding Regex in algorithm solutions the other day and now I'm feeling so much better, so thank YOU!

I genuinely feel like I'm developing the skill for spotting when and where to use them after so much practice! — feedback on twitter

Sample chapters

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters on GitHub.

GitHub repo

Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/learn_js_regexp for markdown source, example files, exercise solutions and other details related to the book.

Chapters

1. Preface
2. Why is it needed?
3. RegExp introduction
4. Anchors
5. Alternation and Grouping
6. Escaping metacharacters
7. Dot metacharacter and Quantifiers
8. Interlude: Tools for debugging and visualization
9. Working with matched portions
10. Character class
11. Groupings and backreferences
12. Interlude: Common tasks
13. Lookarounds
14. Unicode
15. Further Reading

Feedback and Errata

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this ebook. It could be anything from a simple thank you, Gumroad rating, 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:

• Issue Manager: https://github.com/learnbyexample/learn_js_regexp/issues
• E-mail: learnbyexample.net@gmail.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample