material for a talk about regexes

morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I am thinking about giving a talk about regexes at my local Gophers (i.e. Go-hackers) meetup.

While the talk will mainly be about different regex-engines in Go, I would like to include some introductory material about regexes (what are they, what can I do with them) for which I am at the moment too lazy to create from scratch.

So my question is: Is there any material out there that explains what regexes are in a language-agnostic way that I could use?

And just to assure you: My talk will be a shameless plug about the virtues of the perl-ecosystem by extolling the virtues of using Regexp::Common to generate regexes that go directly into the Go-enine (thanks haukex by the way).

Many thanks!

Comment on material for a talk about regexes

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Re: material for a talk about regexes by eyepopslikeamosquito (Bishop) on Feb 17, 2019 at 06:56 UTC
Just a few regex links I remember in case they are useful: Teaching Regular Expression Pattern Matching The craziest RegExes you ever created Negating Regexes: Tips, Tools, And Tricks Of The Trade Training non-programmers in Perl regexps Style question: regex versus string builtin function Yet Another Rosetta Code Problem (Perl, Ruby, Python, Haskell, ...) Re: RFC: Self Assessment Perl Re: regexp match count (goatse) Perl Training Australia - Regular Expressions in Perl 5.10 Mastering Regex in Perl slideshow	[reply]
Re: material for a talk about regexes by davido (Cardinal) on Feb 17, 2019 at 08:25 UTC
Demonstrate backtracking and alternation, those sorts of things using Regexp::Debugger's rxrx utility. Dave	[reply]
Re: material for a talk about regexes by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Feb 17, 2019 at 04:09 UTC
I'm not aware of a regex notation that is "language-agnostic" in a thorough-going way. Maybe the closest would be PCRE, but since that's (supposedly) Perl-compatible by definition, maybe you could just get a pre-Perl-version-5.10 copy of perlretut or perlrequick and base your introductory stuff on that. Or else find a shamelessly ripped-off copy of Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions book on-line somewhere and rip it off even further. Give a man a fish: `<%-{-{-{-<`	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: material for a talk about regexes by LanX (Sage) on Feb 17, 2019 at 15:36 UTC
> Perl-compatible by definition, Nomen non est omen! (In this case) Cheers Rolf _{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :) Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}	[reply]
Re: material for a talk about regexes by bliako (Monsignor) on Feb 17, 2019 at 11:07 UTC
Regex in the context of finite state automata? The latter can be useful for many other programming tasks. I sometimes find it useful to visualise program flow using these. See http://www.zsoltnagy.eu/visualizing-regex-execution-using-finite-state-machines/ and two online "visualisers" https://regexper.com/ and http://ivanzuzak.info/noam/webapps/fsm2regex/	[reply]
Re: material for a talk about regexes by Anonymous Monk on Feb 18, 2019 at 08:20 UTC
This++ "Or else find a shamelessly ripped-off copy of Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions book on-line somewhere and rip it off even further. " This is not only a great book (should be compulsory), but the first few chapters do talk about regex engine types as a whole , before going on to lang specific (inc Perl) ones. Cheers Chris	[reply]


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