For those of you looking to shoot your foot clean off with some programming fun, may I suggest some study in a dialect of pure geek otherwise known as regular expressions … please, you can stop screaming NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOO now.
Arguably the most powerful of text manipulation tools, regular expressions allow you match and/or modify variant text blocks. For example, the following snippet allows me to find books of the Bible within a given text block:
my $BibleBooks = “Genesis|Exodus| … |Jude|Revelation”;
my $varTextBlk = “In the book of Exodus we find a reference to Genesis …
if ($varTextBlk =~ m/$BibleBooks/gi) { …
Pretty nifty eh? Well, yes, only if you can actually create some compelling content with it. And I intend to do just that in the form of a little script that will look through text and tag Scripture references to the BibleGateway … yeah, I knew that’d get your attention.
But before I can make sense of my ‘Scripturizer’ script, you’re going to need to do some homework (you may begin screaming again) … here is a suggested reading list of mostly Perl-centric approaches to regular expressions:
- Perl.com – perlretut
- Linux-Learn.org – Regular Expressions
- Regular Expression Tutorial
- Perl Regular Expression Tutorial
- Python – Regular Expression HOWTO
- Regular Expressions in Java
- PHP Regular Expressions
- Using Perl Compatible Regular Expressions with PHP
- Learning to Use Regular Expressions by Example