Kirk Jackson's Page of Words - Understanding code: How .NET regex's work

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Understanding code: How .NET regex's work

Jeff Moser writes How .NET Regular Expressions Really Work.

I've got a soft spot for regular expressions (programming Perl can do that to you), and while I understand backtracking and greedy / lazy matching, I've never actually read the source code for a regex library before.

If you haven't either, and want to benefit from someone else's description of the 14,000 lines of .NET regular expression library, you'll enjoy this post.

Kirk

.NET

posted on Wednesday, March 18, 2009 10:31:31 PM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

Thursday, March 19, 2009 8:41:19 AM (New Zealand Standard Time, UTC+12:00)

I always thought that there was an opportunity to make a more readable version of regexs that are compiled down to that regular expression string. It could be a 3rd party library.

Although tools like the reAnimator do help with comprehension

http://osteele.com/tools/reanimator/

Matthew Holloway | matthewAT NOSPAMholloway dot co dot nz

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