Welcome to Sorcerer's Isle, a weblog covering a multitude of topics, ranging from programming to 3D graphics; photography to gadgets; tutorials to tinkering. Regular Expressions

<p>It's 1st June 2010 today, and that means we're celebrating for the third time the annual International Regular Expressions Day.</p> <p><a href="http://www.bennadel.com">Ben Nadel</a> kicked off this event two years ago, in order to promote the use of Regex, especially amongst those who might consider them something scary and obscure.</p> <p>As before, Ben is running a contest, this year's prizes being some O'Reily Regex books and IIS Mod-Rewrite Pro licenses.</p> <p>Entry to the competition requires writing some code, and the deadline is today, so if you're interested then hurry up and <a href="http://www.bennadel.com/blog/1923-3rd-Annual-Inter-National-Regular-Expression-Day-And-Prizes-June-1st-2010.htm">read the blog entry to find out more</a>.</p> <br/> <p style="text-align:center"><big><a href="http://www.regular-expression-day.com/">Happy Regex Day!</a></big></p> <br/>

2010-06-01T14:20:26Z

<p><a href="http://www.hybridchill.com/projects/jre-utils.html">Java RegEx Utilities</a>, or jre-utils, is a CFC which provides a convenient way to access <a href="http://www.java.com">Java</a>'s <a href="http://www.regular-expressions.info/">regular expression</a> functionality.</p> <p>Whilst <a href="http://www.adobe.com/coldfusion">ColdFusion</a>, <a href="http://www.getrailo.com">Railo</a>, and <a href="http://www.openbluedragon.org">openBD</a> are all built on Java, and <a href="http://www.opencfml.org">CFML</a> does have regular expression functions, they do not actually use the Java regular expression engine, which supports many useful regex constructs.</p> <p>The purpose of jre-utils is to provide this extra power to CFML developers in a familiar and easy to use way.</p> <p>I will shortly be releasing v0.7 of jre-utils, which adds a number of new functions, as well as making things more consistent, so I decided I would give this quick preview of what it contains.</p>

2009-04-09T21:47:00Z

<p>Today, 1st June 2008, has been officially decreed as Regular Expressions Day.</p> <p>And in honour of this event, there are a couple of regex-oriented competitions happening.</p> <p>Ben Nadel, nominator of this great day, kicked things off with a handful of prizes for the best comments: <a href="http://bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:1243.view">June 1st 2008 - National Regular Expression Day!</a></p> <p>The deadline for Ben's competition is today - that is, you must post the comment on (or before) RegExp Day, and the winners will be selected tomorrow.</p> <p>Don't despair if you miss that though, as Steve Levithan also has a regular expression competition running, and the deadline for that is Friday 13th, almost two weeks from now: <a href="http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/regexday-2008">Regex Day Contest</a></p> <p class="c">Happy Reg Ex Day!</p>

2008-06-01T14:48:46Z

<p>I have just released <a href="http://jreutils.riaforge.org">Java RegEx Utilities</a> on <a href="http://www.riaforge.org">RIAForge</a>, which is a CFC enabling easy access to Java Regular Expression functionality, adding to what is available in the standard CFML functions.</p>

2008-04-05T23:30:13Z