It's Good to be Greedy: Keeping a Straight Face around Regular Expressions

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After a quick introduction to the regular expression syntax accompanied by a number of samples to familiarise the audience with the basic concepts, this presentation gives an in-depth coverage of the advanced features of regular expressions, including back-referencing and the numerous forms of look-ahead and look-behind assertions. Real-life examples will be used to further explain techniques, as well as a live demonstrations of pattern matching and replacement. Although the demonstrations will most likely be performed using PHP scripts, the paper and accompanying talk will be focused at the use of regular expressions and will be largely programming language agnostic.

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Paper: Good to be Greedy: Keeping a Straight Face around Regular Expressions, It's

Ben Balbo was born in Germany, grew up in the UK, lives in Melbourne and likes Guinness.

While he isn't drinking Guinness (which is most of the time in Melbourne, as it just doesn't taste the same), he earns a living writing PHP code, managing servers, playing with databases and drinking coffee. He also finds himself dealing with clients on a (too) frequent basis, which can tend to drive him nuts.

He has also been known to talk in public about web development related topics, which comes as part of the package of being on the committee of both the Melbourne PHP User Group and Open Source Developers' Club. Although he wouldn't admit this, his participation at this level is secretly only in order to go to restaurants or pubs after the meetings.

When he doesn't work, Ben enjoys riding his motorbike as often as possible, snowboarding as often as possible and spending weekends in the bush as often as possible. The latter is made even more enjoyable through the liberal lighting of camp fires, and the prerequisite chopping of wood with his shiny new chainsaw.