The Instructions

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

Mastering Regular Expressions was Mine

Amazingly, I happen to actually be on page 123 in one of the books I’m reading, which happens to be right next to my computer on my desk right now, which happens to be Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl. Here are the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences:

• Sun’s Java regex package supports set operations within character classes.
• For example, you can match all non-vowel English letters with “[a-z] minus [aeiou]”.
• The nomenclature for this may seem a bit odd a first—it’s written as [[a-z]&&[^aeiou]], and read aloud as “this and not that.”

By the way, did you notice the typo? Yes, it was actually in the book. I pick up on so many errors like that all the time that I’m always considering becoming an editor.

Update (added 9:02 PM): Okay, enough people have asked me about this, unable to find the error in one of the sentences above, that I figure it’s time I let the cat out of the bag. If you really want to know where it is, here’s the answer.