If you consider yourself a programmer and you have not learned regular expressions yet now is the time! At some point in your development you will need to manipulate strings in more complicated ways that simple string functions can’t provide. Regular expressions are used in almost all programming languages and are considered the de facto standard for string manipulation. Regular expressions can also be used in searches and many other utilities.

The problem with regular expressions is that nobody wants to learn them because they look very intimidating. Don’t worry though, we will try to make it as painless as possible.

When I first looked at regular expressions I have to admit they looked absolutely foriegn. You can’t really look at a example snippets and learn a whole lot as you can with some languages.

For example a regular expression might look like this:

((?=.*\d)(?=.*[a-z])(?=.*[A-Z]).{8,15})

If you are new to regular expressions this will look like absolute gibberish or some encrypted code. With regular expressions you have to start with absolutely nothing and build up. Examples snippets simply wont do. Read more »

Well if you have decided to take the plunge into Perl I commend you. So far my experience with Perl has been really great. I have already made very useful programs for both Windows and Linux. Coming from a web development background I like to think of Perl as the “PHP for operating systems”. If PHP is great for creating dynamic websites, Perl is great for manipulating anything to do with your operating system and applications. The best part is Perl has similar syntax.

Before you can create all this useful stuff you need to actually go out and get the Perl interpreter since it is a scripting language. Read more »

This article is here to help you get a jump start on using the UPS Shipping API. This article is part 1 of the series that will help you get all the required tools to get you up and running. Later the series will expand upon each service the API has to offer as well as go into detail on how to create your custom programs using various languages and show you examples with both PHP and Perl programming languages.

What is the UPS API?

 
The UPS API is a tool to allow you to communicate with the UPS servers using pretty much any programming language you want. This allows us to send our information, like addresses and weight and receive shipping rates and other information form UPS. UPS provides access to this API for free so developers can interact with their services to provide UPS information through their own custom apps. Whether it be through your web based ecommerce system to accurately determine shipping costs or display tracking information through your website. Read more »

Eric Wendelin over at eriwen.com was kind enough to let me post an article about Vim on his blog today. It is a nice guide to Vim for people that have never used Vim looking to add some productivity to their programing. If you have used Vim for years you might learn something as well.

While you are there check out some of his other articles. There are some great ones on grep, sed, awk, and lots more.

Vim is a beautiful tool

With my newly acquired Perl and regular expression skills I was trying to put them to the test and get a little practice. I asked a friend of mine if he had any regular expressions I should write. He first gave me an easy one. Replace ‘foo‘ with ‘bar‘ only when bar follows the word ‘blah‘. So after a minute or two I returned with a working regular expression.

Well that was easy…

Now for something a little trickier. He said, I want a regular expression that would print out words that land on every third letter ‘e‘ except if that word was ‘the‘. This doesn’t mean he wanted the third word that has the letter ‘e‘. Read more »

In response to David’s post on PHP IMDB Information Grabber, I thought I would extend his idea and grab the cover image for the movie and save it. Read more »

I don’t want to have to login to Twitter all the time to do updates. So what I made was a script that displays a small text box near my twitter updates on my blog when I am logged in. This is handy because not only does is display your tweets it also gives you an opportunity to update them while you are working on a blog post or just browsing around checking your own blog. Read more »

I am on a huge Perl kick lately. I have been making tons of different perl scripts for many different uses. Some of them useful and some are just plain silly. In this post we are going to talk about making an easy script that will go out and check the pagerank of any site that you want. Then we will make the script run through PHP so we can display our result on a website. Read more »