What good is data if you can't interpret it? For data to be useful, we need it in a form that we can understand. For example, if we wanted to build a file crawler (see the program at the end of Chapter 7, "Working with Files in Directories"), the actual links we would parse look like this: <a href="foo.htm">Foo Description</a> However, this form is useless to us. If we wanted to get the link by itself, we would use a regular expression. The actual regular expression might look something like this: <a.*href=\"(.+)\".*>.*<\/a> But that is getting a little bit ahead of ourselves . First, let us go over some basic regular expressions. |