DCPHP: Demystifying Regexes in PHP

Have you been scared off by Klingon-looking one-liners in Perl? Do you resort to writing complicated recursive functions just to parse some HTML? Don't!

In this talk, taken from php[architect]'s Advanced PHP class (http://www.phparch.com/training/advanced-php-development/), I'll demystify regular expressions and show you how best to do them in PHP. We'll cover the syntax and functions that make PHP a great text-parsing language, and give you the foundation to learn more.

As a bonus, I'll give you the two cases people often use as examples for regexes that PHP gives you better native ways to accomplish.

Your organizer, Sandy Smith, will be giving the talk. I've been programming PHP for 13-14 years now, and first started web programming in Perl. So I had to get to know regular expressions. Once you get over the initial fear, they are super-useful and make life as a programmer much better.