Regular Expressions for Dummies
videos

Regular Expressions for Dummies: Screencast Series

on Nov 10th 2009 with 26 comments

Over the course of a handful of video tutorials, I’m going to teach you how to use regular expressions effectively in your Javascript and PHP applications. As always, I’ll assume you know absolutely zip.

Editor’s note – this series has been transferred to Nettuts+ from our sister site, ThemeForest. It was originally published in early 2009 by yours truly.

Lesson 1: Introduction

Lesson 2: Matching

Lesson 3: Validating Email Addresses

Lesson 4: Javascript and “Replace”

Lesson 5: Preg_match_all, and Scraping Data


 
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I'm the editor of Nettuts+, and love making the process of building for the web as easy as possible. Also, I'm finishing up my latest book on Laravel Testing! If you want be friends, say hi on Twitter.  

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  • http://spotdex.com/ David Moreen

    Oh man Jeffrey, I needed this really bad. One thing that I still have yet to master/learn and don’t look forward to is regular expressions. I suppose now is a better time then ever…

    • http://www.jeffrey-way.com Jeffrey Way
      Author

      Hey David – it’s not as hard as it looks. :) I promise. I have a more extensive article coming out later this week (Thursday) which should help as well.

  • Joao Aliano

    love them meat ‘n potatoz
    reg ex with lotsa gravyie, plz

  • http://fswebsolutions.com Fahim

    Hey Jeffrey, loving the videos especially about this topic. It can be so powerful once you grasp the findementals.

    If you can, it would be nice if you could do a short video tutorial on how to apply this on .htaccess files for redirecting, clean urls etc.

    Keep up the good work.

    Fahim (http://fswebsolutions.com)

    • http://notmybase.com Hussein Duvigneau

      Agreed, vote++ for tutorial on regex + redirect!

  • http://www.kaynat.com parvez

    oh really love it :0 thanks man u great :D

  • Sajid Ali

    Thank you very much, i was hoping for such a great tutorial.

    Really helpful.

  • Anonymous

    As you have told in the beginning,
    “this series has been transferred to Nettuts+ from our sister site, ThemeForest.”

    I would like the actual ThemeForest links for all 5 video, so i can go there and see the actual comments that users had made.

    I hope it can help us.

  • David

    How come I get an error.

    undifined variable? I think I am ready to retire. I’ll go and bother my wife for few hours. Maybe, That makes me happy for a while. Stress!!

    $test = ‘model1=David1&listed1=555.00&net1=555.00&model2=David1&listed2=555.00&net2=555.00′;

    preg_match_all(‘/-\d+\=/i’, $test, $sorted_new);

    foreach($sorted_new[1] as $str) {
    echo $str.”";
    }

  • Radoslav

    David, you search for matches[1], but no “()” was defined in pattern :) close the sting in () what you want…

  • http://visualmagick.com Dan

    For some reason I can’t get the ^ symbol to work for the patterns beginning. eg ^cat for pattern

    catmobile cats r us cat catch cat. Does that one not work?

  • http://prosperva.com Prosper

    I like this tutorial but I was wondering how I can get content wrapped in div tags

    example

  • abdelhakim knis

    i really appriciate your efforts jeff and i hope th

  • abdelhakim knis

    i really appriciate your efforts jeff and big thanks.
    I have a littele problem that i can’t watch the screencasts ,there is no streaming;so would you please fix that probleme because i really learned a lot of stuff from the tuts network.

  • http://learnwebsitedesign.com/ LearnWebsiteDesign.com

    Man Ive been looking for a set of tutorials like these. Ive found others but most just are clear and to the point.

    Thank You Thank You Thank You So MUCH!!!
    Jose

  • Lorenzo Peña Álvarez

    I can’t view number the number 4 and number 5 :( Maybe the link is not working or it just got deleted. Is there any other place where I can watch them?

    Thanks

  • Rod Elias

    Hi Jeffrey.
    Thank you very much for posting such a great and useful screencasts.
    I got this little note here:
    In Lesson 3 (Validating Email Addresses) we can also have strings such as rod@wgo.com.br
    Therefore, I think one more precise regular expression for matching that would be something like:
    \b[\w-]+@[\w-]+\.[A-Za-z_-]+[.A-Za-z]*\b

    That’s it and keep up the good work.

    rod~

  • http://www.atthy.com/ Sathish

    Great Tutorials.. Until now regular expressions were some weird characters to me.. Now things start to make sense.. Thanks a ton..

  • http://www.ronn23.de roNn23

    Wow, what great tutorials!
    Regex was only hieroglyphics for me until now. Thanks a lot!

  • http://elainevellacatalano.com Elaine

    Very useful indeed! Thanks :)

  • http://academicwriterjobs.com Academic writer

    simply awesome !
    Thanks also it release for all kinds of user without paying a single cent !!!

  • http://d3nnnis.com d3nnnis

    Well explained tutorials! Just what i needed :)

    Really thank you!

  • IamRafi

    Guys

    You are helping people like us to get better with these programming skills.

    God bless you all.

  • https://plus.google.com/106393478695568433143/posts Gabriel Vasile

    This is invaluable

  • Pablo

    Great tutorial Jeffrey, Thank you

  • http://invisibleorder.com/ Mike Reid

    For someone like me, moving from copyediting into the technical details of e-publication, these tutorials are aimed perfectly.