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Irregular expressions regularly

  • Unsent letters

    I must be getting more patient with age because, there was a time when I would send out e-mails during the deepest fits of rage but, not anymore!  In more recent times I've found that sending unpleasant e-mails to your boss after a night out “on the town” or, sending unpleasant-mail to someone who has fallen foul of a promise is not the best way to get a pleasing, win-win outcome.  Today, while contemplating how I might communicate unpleasantries to one particular individual I discovered this page:

  • Fred : Lazy or just plain Greedy?

    The question of greediness and backtracking has come up around here quite a bit of late - as they are the essence of what regex is all about - and, while I don't plan on ranting about either just now, it's worth a reminder as to what can cause backtracking can occur.

  • Feedable is alive and well

    A few days ago everybody's favourite Geek :-) ping'ed me asking for some assistance with his new project.  Basically, Roy wanted me to come up with some regex's to do the scraping for Feedable thus freeing him up to focus on the middle-tier stuff.  It's been a bunch of fun so far coming up with interesting ways to get at text to return useful data.  Take - for example - the feed that we added last night for Allen Bauer's blog (which looks interesting by the way); pull that feed up in your aggregator, and also bring up the page in a browser; look at the titles for the feed entries and also note their position in the webpage!  That's the kind of fun thing that I've been doing - coming up a single pattern to do a whole smack of conditional matching etc. to return useable results.  Oh the fun!!! :D

  • MarkItUp.Web.Utilities.Personalization

    One of the projects that I'm currently working on requires a fair amount of "personalization" data to be stored in Cookies on the client so, this afternoon I decided to create a wrapper around the HttpCookies collection class to abstract some of the tasks such as Add/Update/Delete of user information and setting expiry dates on certain types of information.