Suggestions on learning Regular Expressions?

[Phloem]

I'm wanting to learn more (I know nothing) about regular expressions.
I've read the basics at wikipedia, etc. Any suggestions on quick
reference charts.

In this chart, I don't understand what the four column mean and which
one is used in TextSoap.

http://www.hci-matters.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/regex_chart_barnes.pdf

[Mark Munz]

TextSoap *currently* uses OgreKit, which supports PCRE (Perl
Compatible Regular Expression).

A site that I've found very helpful:

http://www.regular-expressions.info

Then a lot of experimenting. A great tool to grab *right now* is
Reggy. It lets you see what gets matched as you build up your regular
expression.

I've been looking at ways to simplify the expression searches for the
more common types of searches.

I would definitely be interested in a list of the common types of
searches. I'm also interested in how much of it is plain text and how
much of it is manipulating HTML or XML.

Mark

--
Mark Munz
unmarked software
http://www.unmarked.com/

[BC]

Thanks Mark for Reggy and the links. As a total newbie, I'm coming at
TextSoap with my MS Word Find/Replace experience. The nice thing about
that for novices is that it has a list of formatting terms you can
find/replace without having to know anything about regexp, and it's
built into the Find/Replace window. I've attached a couple screen
shots of Word's list. Common find/replace items for me are returns,
tabs, commas, spaces, line breaks, and font styles. What I like in
Word is how quickly I can find something and replace it with whatever
I want. I know I can do this TextSoap, but I just haven't spent enough
time in the app, nor know enough about regular expressions. And I want
to get there.

[Mark Munz]

Admittedly, regex can be pretty complex. While I think an interactive
editor may help when building regular expressions, it doesn't solve
the problem of complexity of those expressions.

Sometimes the complexity is required, but often times its a 400HP
engine in city traffic, a bit overkill. One of the big things I am
looking at for the future is a much simpler approach, not unlike what
you see with Word.

Mark

[Hank Roberts]

> simpler ... not unlike

That would be very helpful. There's an astonishing amount one can do
with Word's find/replace, mostly documented at the mvps.org website
not by Microsoft; http://word.mvps.org/Search/SearchResults.asp?query=wildcard