Scripting and automation tasks often need to extract particular portions of text from input data or modify them from one format to another.

This book will help you learn Ruby Regular Expressions, a mini-programming language for all sorts of text processing needs.

The book heavily leans on examples to present features of regular expressions one by one. It is recommended that you manually type each example and experiment with them.

Exercises are included to test your understanding. Reference solutions are also provided.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with programming basics. You should also have a working knowledge of Ruby syntax and features like string formats, string and Enumerable methods.

You are also expected to get comfortable with reading documentation, searching online, visiting external links provided for further reading, tinkering with illustrated examples, asking for help when you are stuck and so on. In other words, be proactive and curious instead of just consuming the content passively.