book on regular expressions
On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, S Ellison wrote:
"hadley wickham" <h.wickham at gmail.com> 11/12/2007 17:02 >>>
Could someone recommend a good book on regular expressions with focus
on
applications/use as it might relate to R. I remember there was a
mention of
such a reference book recently, but I could not locate that message
on the
archive.
It's not specific to R, which wraps regular expressions up in quoted strings so has a couple of wrinkles compared to Perl, but I found the O'Reilly " Regular Expression Pocket Reference" a good quick reference, and rather cheaper than the whole book. It's hard to see R users needing chapter and verse on the complete gamut of regexps.
One has to remember that books go out of date: for example the advent of UTF-8 locales has led to a number of changes in the implementations. The O'Reilly books have third (2006) and second (2007) editions. (BTW the pocket reference is not by the same author as 'Mastering Regular Expressions', so in no sense is part of 'the whole book'.) I don't think anyone has mentioned the references given on the help page ?regexp: they are a great deal more reliable than some of the third-party write-ups that have been mentioned.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595