You’re working with some data and find yourself needing to find a specific piece of information, but your searches keep matching things that you don’t want. While basic searches are fine for some things, every once in a while you need something more powerful.
Enter regular expressions (also referred to as “regex”). BUT WAIT! Before you scroll to the next session description: did you know that this powerful searching capability is available in things like Word and Excel, as well as Google Search Console and Google Analytics? And not only can you use it to search for information, you can also use it to transform information!
In this session, we’ll jump into a brief history of regex, discuss pattern matching, and dive into the fundamentals of how we can use regex to surface the data we’ve been searching for in powerful ways. We’ll play some regex-based games to help hone our skills, all while demystifying the idea that regular expressions are dark magic, beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.
Key Takeaways
- The purpose of delimiters
- The 12 special characters, how to use them, and how they alter what the Regular Expression engine matches
- What character classes are, and how they can be recreated using the special characters we learned earlier
- What positive and negative lookaheads are, and how they can be used
