Understand And Learn Regular Expressions for Better Coding
Regular expressions, often abbreviated as “regex,” hold a unique and powerful place in the world of computer science. They are a versatile and compact means of describing and manipulating text patterns.
I’ve known about regular expressions for a long time, but I didn’t really understand them. Now that I really understand them and use them, I find it much easier to write certain programs and manipulate text on my computer.
I’ll try to introduce you to them if you’re not familiar with them.
Understanding Regular Expressions
Regular expressions (regex) are a fundamental tool for searching, manipulating, and validating text patterns. At their core, regular expressions are sequences of characters that form a search pattern. They serve as a powerful means of describing and identifying complex patterns within strings of text.
Your First Pattern
The simplest pattern is just a word, for example: “dog”. “dog” is a regex that will match all the words containing “dog”. For example:
dog- abc
dog - ab
dogc
Usually, a pattern starts with a “/”. So our full pattern becomes “/dog” (but I will omit this…
