This blog post highlights a video on how to use regular expressions.

It’s been a while since I did the MySQL QA and Bash Training Series. The 13 episodes were quite enjoyable to make, and a lot of people watched the video’s and provided great feedback.

In today’s new video, I’d like to briefly go over regular expressions. The session will cover the basics of regular expressions, and then some. I’ll follow up later with a more advanced regex session too.

Regular expressions are very versatile, and once you know how to use them – especially as a script developer or software coder – you will return to them again and again. Enjoy!

Presented …

Often times I find myself having to handle a particular portion of a SQL statement via a script. I've written a lot of specialized regular expressions over time to handle these tasks, but the one that I've had to write the most is a basic 'tokenizer' which understands the quoting semantics of a MySQL statement. That is, it understands `BackTick`, 'Single Quote' and "Double Quoted" strings.

#PHP Heredoc syntax
$regex = <<< END_OF_REGEX
/
  [^ \"'`(),]*\([^)]*\)    #match functions like concat(x,"y",`a`.`z`) or sum(`xyz`);
  |\([^)]*?\)              #match grouped items
  |"[^"]*?"                #match double quoted items
  |'[^']*?'                #match single quoted items
  |`[A-Za-z0-9_ .'\"()+\\-&^%\$+?%\\/\\\\!`]+`  #match backtick mysql names
  |[^ ,]+                  #match keywords, operators and aliases
  |,
/xi
END_OF_REGEX;

EDIT: After some comments and further testing, I've …