http://www.regex-guru.info Irregular updates on the wonderful world of regular expressions by Jan Goyvaerts, developer of premier regular expression software and web sites Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:31:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Last Friday Jeff Atwood makes a case for judicious use of regular expressions in the article Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems on his Coding Horror blog. Nitpick: In free-spacing mode (RegexOptions.IgnoreWhitespace in .NET), the # starts a comment all by itself, which runs to the end of the line. ... http://www.regex-guru.info/2008/06/jeff-atwood-on-regular-expressions/ Late last year I resolved to start writing more. Setting up this blog and two others was a big part of that. Though my blogs have been a little quiet lately, I've actually been doing a lot of writing. But offline. Whenever I set out to do something, ... http://www.regex-guru.info/2008/05/writing-offline/ I always emphasize on the importance of testing your regular expressions on all possible input data. Particularly on any input that you might get that you don't want the regex to match. Writing a regular expression that matches something is often quite straightforward. Making it match all the variations ... http://www.regex-guru.info/2008/05/follow-up-with-adequate-testing/ .*? is what I call the "lazy dot". It matches any sequence of characters. It matches as few of them as needed to make the whole regex match. The problem is that if there's no way for the regex to match, the lazy dot will continue all ... http://www.regex-guru.info/2008/05/no-follow-the-lazy-dot/