Practical Usage of Regular Expressions

The aim of Practical Usage of Regular Expressions is to show that there are many practical uses of even simple regexes for tasks such as quality assurance (ensuring consistency), automating conversions, intelligent searches, etc., in particular in conjunction with a translation tool, such as memoQ, Trados Studio or Wordfast. Although this book concentrates on a translation tool environment, the described basic language elements and examples apply to Microsoft .NET-based environments, and indeed, most regex engines. Even complex constructs are explained clearly with schematic diagrams and appropriate examples. The clear structure, many illustrative examples, useful regexes and syntax summary make the book ideal as reference. The comprehensive worked example gives beginners a painless introduction to regexes and explains all needed concepts, except for the most advanced applications. Although concise, the book provides all regex users with detailed reference material, not just for translators, but also for general applications. To augment the described CAT (Computer Assisted Translation) tools, general editors that provide regex support (wildcards case of Microsoft Word) are also discussed. This fourth edition has been extended to discuss regexes in OmegaT (although it does not use the .NET flavour), as well as some sections, have been clarified and extended. Rather than general, generic examples and sample regexes provided in most books, the book provides more than 100 practical examples (with detailed explanations), mostly for typical translator tasks, to augment the text content. The reader exercises (with solutions) allow readers to test their knowledge and also make the book ideal as tutorial. Unlike my companion book (without subtitle "An introduction to regexes for translators"), this book provides details of usage of regexes in popular CAT tools. This revised edition includes a greatly expanded "Techniques" chapter that describes the use of regexes in many practical situations. The discussions for more advanced techniques, such as bounds, lookarounds, atomic groups, and optimisations. have also been extended.