Regular expressions

What are regular expressions?

Regular expressions are sequences of characters that define patterns for searching within text. They allow for flexible and advanced searching, matching, and manipulation of textual data.

Filtering

The primary use of regular expressions is data filtering. This can involve extracting specific patterns from text or eliminating fragments that do not meet certain criteria.

Create rule

Not only for filtering, but regular expressions can also be used for generating rules on a chosen attribute. This is useful in the process of transforming data contained in individual columns, where we want to replace phrases with others.

Basic regex syntax

Regular expression syntax (regex) includes several key elements that are worth knowing to effectively use this tool. Here are a few basic regular expressions:

Characters

. - matches any single character (except newline)

\d - matches any digit

\w - matches any alphanumeric character

\b – word boundary

^ – start of sequence

$ – end of sequence

Examples:

Below are a few regexes:

“s” - finds the letter “s”

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^Se - finds a string starting with "Se"

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Quantifiers;

* – matches 0 or more occurrences

+ – matches 1 or more occurrences

? – matches 0 or 1 occurrence

{} – matches an exact number of characters

Examples:

"a?b+$" - possible "a", followed by one or more "b" at the end of the sequence

aa, ab, abb, abbbb, ac, abcd, abbc, accd, acd, acdb, acabb

Grouping:

[ ] – matches all characters in brackets

[^ ] – matches all characters outside the brackets

() – grouping

| – or

Example:

“[A-Z. ]” – find all capital letters, dots, and spaces

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