Regular Expression Essential

SkillsFuture Course - Regular Expression Essential

Learn how to find and manipulate text quickly and easily using regular expressions. This course will cover the basic syntax of regular expressions, shows how to create flexible matching patterns, and demonstrates how the regular expression engine parses text to find matches. The course also covers referring back to previous matches with backreferences and creating complex matching patterns with lookaround assertions, and explores the most common applications of regular expressions.


Topics include:

• Creating flexible patterns using character sets
• Achieving efficiency when using repetition
• Understanding different types of search strategies
• Writing logical and efficient alternations
• Capturing groups and reusing them with backreferences
• Developing complex patterns with lookaround assertions
• Working with Unicode and multibyte characters
• Matching email addresses, URLs, dates, HTML tags, and credit card numbers
• Using search and replace to format a document

1. Regular Expressions

• What are regular expressions?
• The history of regular expressions
• Regular expression engines
• Installing an engine
• Notation conventions and modes

2. Characters

• Literal characters
• Metacharacters
• The wildcard metacharacter
• Escaping metacharacters
• Other special characters

3. Character Sets

• Defining a character set
• Character ranges
• Negative character sets
• Metacharacters inside character sets
• Shorthand character sets
• POSIX bracket expressions

4. Repetition Expressions

• Repetition metacharacters
• Quantified repetition
• Greedy expressions
• Lazy expressions
• Using repetition efficiently

5. Grouping and Alternation Expressions

• Grouping metacharacters
• Alternation metacharacter
• Writing logical and efficient alternations
• Repeating and nesting alternations

6. Anchored Expressions

• Start and end anchors
• Line breaks and Multiline mode
• Word boundaries

7. Capturing Groups and Backreferences

• Backreferences
• Backreferences to optional expressions
• Finding and replacing using backreferences
• Non-capturing group expressions

8. Lookaround Assertions

• Positive lookahead assertions
• Double-testing with lookahead assertions
• Negative lookahead assertions
• Lookbehind assertions
• The power of positions

9. Unicode and Multibyte Characters

• About Unicode
• Unicode in regular expressions
• Unicode wildcards and properties

10. Useful Regular Expressions

• How to use this chapter
• Matching names
• Matching postal codes
• Matching email addresses
• Matching URLs
• Matching decimal numbers and currency
• Matching IP addresses
• Matching dates
• Matching times
• Matching HTML tags
• Matching passwords
• Matching credit card numbers
• Finding words near other words
• Formatting with Search and Replace

Alfred And is the founder of Galaxy e-Business Pte Ltd and Tertiary Infotech Pte Ltd. He has more than 10 years experience in the IT industry. He has worked on hundreds of eCommerce and CMS projects. His skill sets are R, Python, HTML, CSS, PHP, MYSQL, C, C++, Photoshop, Magento, Wordpress, SEO, Arduino and Raspberry Pi and mobile apps development.

He gradudated from NUS with a B.Sc. degree in Physics and Ph.D. degree in EE. He also has a MBA degree from Universita Global 21

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