NGWS SDK Documentation  

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Introduction to Regular Expressions

Regular expressions provide a powerful, flexible, and efficient method of processing text. The extensive pattern-matching notation of regular expressions allow you to parse large amounts of text to find matching character patterns. Regular expressions can be used to extract, edit, replace, or delete substrings, or to just add the extracted strings to a collection in order to generate a report. For many applications that deal with strings (such as HTML processing, log file parsing, and HTTP header parsing), regular expressions are an indispensable tool.

NGWS frameworks regular expressions incorporate the most popular features of other regular expression implementations such as those in Perl and awk. NGWS Frameworks regular expressions have been designed to be compatible with Perl 5 but also include features not yet seen in other implementations, such as right-to-left matching and compilation to native code.

The classes that define NGWS frameworks regular expressions are part of the NGWS frameworks base class library and can be used with any language or tool that adopts the NGWS runtime. Regular expressions can be used with ASP+ and the Microsoft Visual Studio 7.0 languages for Internet-based or standalone desktop applications.