Chapter22.Data Validation with Regular Expressions

Chapter 22. Data Validation with Regular Expressions

The basic ways discussed thus far to dissect strings and analyze their contents have been quite rudimentary and require so much work as to be quite expensive to perform. This chapter examines a technology called regular expressions, which enable us to find and extract more complicated pieces of information in our strings and do this in a multiple-byte character set environment.

In this chapter, we will cover

• The definition of regular expressions and the basics of their use

• Potential problems that might arise while using regular expressions

• Use of regular expressions to perform data validation in our web applications

• Functions that use regular expressions to perform more interesting and advanced tasks