PHP for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guide)

If there were just two things you should understand about regular expressions, they would be, one, that regular expressions are supremely useful in advanced programming, and, two, they are easy to comprehend but taxing to write. However, once you understand the rules for writing regular expressions, that extra knowledge will pay off in spades as regular expressions can vastly improve the quality of your programming and save you time in the long run.

In this chapter, I'll identify what regular expressions are, discuss constructing them in great detail, and provide some useful examples demonstrating their capabilities.