The Absolute Bare Minimum Every Programmer Should Know About Regular Expressions

Well, the title says it all and I really don't have anything to add to that, except to say that this is a really, really powerful technology that is very pervasive in many programming as well as scripting languages and as well in mainstream database products.

I really recommend you put in the time and effort to learn regular expressions, they are power tools that are going to open for you a whole new world of text processing possibilities.

Link:
http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

regexp in PHP Arrays:

Clear blanks:

$array = preg_grep('/[^$]/', $array);

Patterns for zip codes

$zip_code = str_replace(' ','','ZIP CODE');	$pattern = array(	  array(		'/^[[:alnum:]]{6,6}+$/',		'/[[:alpha:]]/',		'/[[:digit:]]/'	  ),	  array(		'/^(\d){5,5}+$/'	  )	);		$is_zip_code = true	for($_j = 0; $_j < count($pattern[$_i]); $_j++){	  $is_zip_code = ($is_zip_code and preg_match($pattern[$_i][$_j],$zip_code));	}

Regexp have power to resume your code in rules, then you are able to change the pattern easily.
There are many tools to create regexp patterns.

Blessings!
Edited August 16, 2007 by develCuy (see edit history)