JavaScript Regular Expressions

Leverage the power of regular expressions to create an engaging user experience

About This Book

• Build and use patterns in JavaScript to solve real-world problems
• Simplify complex validation processes by mastering the pattern language in Regex
• A step-by-step guide along with a lot of real-world examples to manipulate text and crunch data, in URLs, paths, markup, and so on

Who This Book Is For

This book is ideal for JavaScript developers and programmers who work with any type of user entry data and want sharpen their skills to become experts.

What You Will Learn

• Structure your patterns and model different types of constraints
• Clean and optimize code with Regex’s processing power
• Solve common use cases and situations
• Extract different types of fields correctly
• Embed regular expressions both in your UI and on the backend
• Efficiently create guard clauses in your functions using patterns
• Create blank capture groups to handle inconsistent data
• Capture parts of a pattern in a group to display, replace, or use character sets to match characters

In Detail

Regular expressions are patterns or templates that allow you to define a set of rules in a natural yet vague way, giving you the ability to match and validate text. Therefore, they have been implemented in nearly every modern programming language. JavaScript’s implementation allows us to perform complex tasks with a few lines of code using regular expressions to match and extract data out of text.

This book starts by exploring what a pattern actually is and how regular expressions express these patterns to match and manipulate user data. You then move on to learning about the use of character classes to define a wild character match, a digit match, and an alphanumeric match. You will then learn to manipulate text and shorten data in URLs, paths, markup, and data exchange, as well as other advanced Regex features.

Finally, you will work through real-world examples, both in the browser and on the server side using Node.js.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Regex
Chapter 2: The Basics
Chapter 3: Special Characters
Chapter 4: Regex in Practice
Chapter 5: Node.js and Regex
Appendix: JavaScript Regex Cheat Sheet