Who should attend:
Intermediate and advanced programmers with at least some practical experience using regular expressions. Attendees should be familiar with Perl notations such as s///, m//, *, +, ., ^, and $.

What you will learn:
A true understanding of how regular expressions work. Even experienced programmers often can't predict how or why an expression might behave as it does. This half-day tutorial fixes that, allowing intermediate and advanced programmers to finally understand exactly how Perl regular expressions work on a very basic level. Targeted toward programmers with at least some practical experience using (and being confused by) regular expressions, the session is divided into two major parts. The first presents the basic mechanics of how a regular expression is interpreted and applied. The second applies this knowledge toward crafting better regular expressions. Common pitfalls are uncovered, and effective workarounds are explored. You will leave with a solid basis upon which experience and practice will build a fearless clinical understanding of even the most hairy regular expression. And you'll be able to craft complex expressions with the knowledge (as opposed to mere hope) that they will work as expected. You will be able to look at:

perl -e '"OReilly and The Perl Conference" =~ /i(.+)+i/'
perl -e '"OReilly and The Perl Conference" =~ /i(.+)+e/'

and understand exactly why the first takes so much longer than the second, and what to do about it.

This session will demystify Perl regular expressions.