Category Archives: Technology

Negative Word Matching with Regular Expressions

Today on the #codeigniter IRC channel someone asked about how to match a string that didn’t start with a specific word using a regex. I quickly threw out that, off the top of my head, /^(abc){0}/ should work. Well, surprisingly, it didn’t. Turns out negatively matching words with regular expressions is a little more difficult. [...]

BarCamp Orlando 2007

BarCamp is coming to Orlando! I’ve been interested in attending some technical conferences for a while now, so BarCamp is coming just in time. I’m looking forward to some interesting presentations and meeting cool locals in the tech industry. I’ll be representing two companies I’m a part of, MindComet and Statiksoft. Others from both [...]

Natural Order Numerical Sorting

I came across an interesting problem today in the CodeIgniter forums. Suppose you have a dataset like this:
1
1.2
1.2.1
1.2.3
1.2.4
2
5
5
5.1
5.7
11
11.1.2
Obviously, the example cited above is sorted, and sorted correctly. Now lets say these values exist in a random order in a database and we want to retrieve them in the same order as above–sorted ascending. The simple [...]

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