Introduction

In this chapter, you will learn about the techniques that can be used for pattern matching and clean coding, which have many uses, perhaps even to facilitate your testing as well.

Regular expressions (regex for short) are a concise and powerful method to search for and match patterns. They may appear alien and intimidating at first, but once you learn the basics, they will quickly appear less difficult, and so you are likely to recognize their usefulness. Regexes are common in many languages and in tools where text and data are involved. So, it is a worthwhile investment to take the time to learn them. A pattern that's expressed as a regex is usually much shorter than the equivalent code that's required to parse and match the same pattern using conventional techniques.

Making use of regexes also leads to clean and maintainable coding practices. For programming projects to be successful, it is critical that the code is easily understood by others and that...