Who should attend: Beginning to intermediate Tcl programmers with some exposure to basic regular expressions who are interested in learning the new text parsing commands in recent releases of Tcl.

For years even Tcl enthusiasts were forced to admit Tcl's lack of extended regular expression (RE) support. In Tcl 8.1, Henry Spencer revitalized Tcl with a more powerful RE engine that supports advanced regular expressions. Tcl 8.2 extended the string command to help Tcl programmers write clear, concise string processing code.

This tutorial focuses on writing efficient and readable string processing scripts in Tcl with the new RE and string features. If you have ever struggled to locate a single line of text, to match a string with a specific number of digits, or to validate a string as a double, this tutorial will teach you what you need to know.

Topics include:

• Using character classes and non-greedy quantifiers to say what you mean in writing RE patterns
• Validating input with 8.2 string commands
• Writing scripts that work with Unicode
• Performance analysis of commonly written Tcl string processing code
• Tips for maximizing efficiency

Tanya Gallagher is Scriptics' Training Manager. She has updated and written curriculum for Scriptics Tcl training and teaches Tcl to training customers. Before joining Scriptics, she was a Curriculum Developer/Technical Instructor at Informix Software, where she specialized in data warehousing tools, primarily those that deal with data extraction and transformation. Tanya holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in industrial/organizational psychology and a Master's of Arts degree in instructional design with a curriculum development emphasis, both from San Jose State University.