Summary

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Page 588

Summary

This concludes our overview of regular expressions. You have enough information about building regular expressions and using them to perform powerful searches in large text files, but there's more to regular expressions. The details can get hairy, but, fortunately, for most practical applications you won't need extreme knowledge of regular expressions. Regular expressions are an inherently difficult topic that is very popular among computer science majors and Unix programmers. However, they are very interesting and should be explored further. We should mention here that Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is based on regular expressions and was designed around them. With Perl you can embed regular expressions in your code just like variables. The If statements of Perl are very compact, but really awkward to understand. If there's a write-only language, this should be Perl. Yet it's quite popular.

You should perform some searches on very large text files (using either of the applications discussed in this chapter) to get an idea of how efficient the RegularExpressions class's code is. Of course, regular expressions aren't the bread and butter of a typical developer, but some tasks can be simplified enormously with the functionality of the RegularExpressions class. You will find this class especially useful if you're interested in language statistics (distribution of word count versus their length, words that contain specific letter combinations, and so on). Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.net is a great resource for text files representative of the English language: It provides thousands of free electronic versions of classic literature.

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Visual Basic  .NET Power Tools
Visual Basic .NET Power Tools
ISBN: 0782142427
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 178

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