Introduction

Regular expressions are a powerful and standardized way of representing patterns in text using special symbols and syntax. A core part of many programming languages, search engines, text editors, and other commonly-used software, regular expressions have a surprisingly wide array of uses, from efficiently finding strings of text in large data sets, to easily formatting complex documents, to quickly replacing many small everyday tasks that might otherwise require writing shell scripts or other programs.

This hands-on workshop introduces regular expressions (regex or regexp) from the ground up. It is taught in two parts, each 1.5 hours long. Part 1 takes us to the end of the “Basic Syntax” section, and part 2 covers the sections after that.

Learning objectives

Upon completing both parts of the workshop, you will be able to:

1. Understand basic regex syntax
2. Apply regex syntax in common applications
3. Understand when it might be appropriate to use regex
4. Adapt regex solutions to support your own work

Preparation

Part 1: no preparation necessary.

Part 2: please download the repository zip file here. We will be using the files in the ‘data’ folder during the workshop.