I recommend the following Book on regular expression matching: "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Freidl Publisher: O'Reilly ISBN:0-596-52812-4
Based on the my "blood, sweat and tears" of using regex type patterns which can be very obfuscated, in addition to reading the syntax from the above book there is some very good software tools to test the patterns: See these link: http://regexlib.com/default.aspx http://www.regular-expressions.info/ Finally in the software spirit of R and Shareware an invaluable too to Test expressions is the software: 1-Expresso http://www.ultrapico.com/ 2-Regexdesigner.Net http://www.sellsbrothers.com/ Hope this Helps... Neil -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of hadley wickham Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 8:28 AM To: Prof Brian Ripley Cc: r-help@r-project.org; S Ellison Subject: Re: [R] book on regular expressions > I don't think anyone has mentioned the references given on the help > page > ?regexp: they are a great deal more reliable than some of the > third-party write-ups that have been mentioned. They are good technical references, but I don't think they're very helpful for someone trying to learn regular expressions. For example, mastering regular expressions takes a very task based approach which is helpful if you want to learn how to match an email address or url correctly with a regular expression (harder than most people think), or to match paired brackets. Hadley -- http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. -------------------------------------------------------- This information is being sent at the recipient's reques...{{dropped:16}} ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
