Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
Writing such a tutorial would be fantastic. And your 'beginning' state might help. If you have time, then please give it a try. There is a lot of incentive here for experts to help check what you do for technical accuracy.
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Thanks for the encouragement, I think I'll try if I can get something useful together over the weekend. If I do, I'll post it for further refinement. I'll bet that next you guys want me to learn XPath, because that is even worse documented than regular expressions, I think
(At least the part in the Calibre manual made very little sense to me. To be honest, I really just had a quick glance, but still...)
Quote:
Originally Posted by chaley
Isn't that a wonder feature of regexps? Any string can match itself, so it is a regexp! When I was teaching programming language compiler construction (regexps have a huge role there), students would light up when they figured that out.  Understanding that a regexp is just a string that matches other strings takes much of the magic out of it. Once we have that, all we are really worrying about is what a character is. |
For me, having some experience writing code definitely helped to understanding regexes, so far. It's somewhat more arcane, but not really more complicated than, say, C print format strings. Still, some behaviour of regexes is, lets say somewhat unexpected for me, so I can't imagine how people without any programming experience might feel when confronted with something like this.