Regular Expressions for Tech Writers

摘要

Regular expressions (regexes) may be one of the most powerful but least utilized technologies available to authors. Most authoring tools provide a Regex option in the search dialog, but when did you use it last? A regex is a special syntax that matches on a pattern of characters. Regexes can be quite complex, but a simple regex can do amazing things. What's nice is that you can learn this language slowly on an as-needed basis, and it's [mostly] not tool-specific. This paper shows real regexes that you can use in your daily work to potentially save considerable time from tedious search and replace operations. You'll see how to use regexes in various authoring tools as well as in scripting such as JavaScript, ExtendScript, or Perl, when some really heavy lifting is required.