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Irregular expressions regularly
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Friends, Countrymen, Romans. Lend me your ears...
Remember when I was in Redmond earlier this year? Remember how I had that massive grin on my face when I got back? This was why:
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MarkItUp.Web.Personalization
A couple of weeks ago I uploaded an assembly that I've been dinking around with to encapsulate operations on cookies, I've just uploaded a new version that fixes some logic errors and you can get it here: Download the bits.
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Creating Markup Text in Visual Basic .NET
Wow, what a happy day to come in and see that my Mark-up article has been published!
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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:
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ExplicitCapture - creating a pattern that can NEVER match!
Today, while reading about ExplicitCapture (page 172 of the Mastering Regular Expressions book), I learnt something totally new; that is, the following will fail:
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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.
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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
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Mode Modifiers
I'm always forgetting these things:
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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.
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"Much that I bound I cannot set free"
ScottW blogs about an experience that he had today involving some help received on the regex list. I originally responded to Scott's cry for assistance with the following psuedo-example which used conditional matching logic: