So far, we've had fun learning how to create regular expressions for different situations. However, you may be wondering what it would be like to apply a regular expression in a real-world situation, such as reading a log file and presenting its information in a user-friendlier format?
In this chapter, we will learn how to implement a simple Node.js application that reads a log file and parses it using a regular expression. This way, we can retrieve specific information from it and output it in a different format. We are going to test all the knowledge we obtained from the previous chapters of this book.
In this chapter we will cover the following topics:
Installing the required software to develop our example
Reading a file with Node.js
Analyzing the anatomy of an Apache log file
Creating a parse with regular expressions to read an Apache log file