The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions

Table of Contents

• Regular Expressions are for Everyone
• FAQ
• Release notes & changelog
• Getting Started
• Finding a proper text editor
• Why a dedicated text editor?
• Windows text editors
• Mac Text Editors
• Sublime Text
• Online regex testing sites
• A better Find-and-Replace
• How to find and replace
• The limitations of Find-and-Replace
• There’s more than find-and-replace
• Your first regex
• Hello, word boundaries
• Word boundaries
• Escape with backslash
• Regex Fundamentals
• Removing emptiness
• The newline character
• Viewing invisible characters
• Match one-or-more with the plus sign
• The plus operator
• Backslash-s
• Match zero-or-more with the star sign
• The star sign
• Specific and limited repetition
• Curly braces
• Curly braces, maximum and no-limit matching
• Cleaning messily-spaced data
• Anchors: A way to trim emptiness
• The caret as starting anchor
• The dollar sign as the ending anchor
• Escaping special characters
• Matching any letter, any number
• The numeric character class
• Word characters
• Bracketed character classes
• Matching ranges of characters with brackets and hyphens
• All the characters with dot
• Negative character sets
• Negative character sets
• Capture, Reuse
• Parentheses for precedence
• Parentheses for captured groups
• Correcting dates with capturing groups
• Using parentheses without capturing
• Optionality and alternation
• Alternation with the pipe character
• Optionality with the question mark
• Laziness and greediness
• Greediness
• Laziness
• Lookarounds
• Positive lookahead
• Negative lookahead
• Positive lookbehind
• Negative lookbehind
• The importance of zero-width (TODO)
• Regexes in Real Life
• Why learn Excel?
• The limits of Excel (todo)
• Delimitation
• Mixed commas and other delimiters
• Dealing with text charts (todo)
• Completely unstructured text (todo)
• Moving in and out and into Excel
• From Data to HTML (TODO)
• Simple HTML tricks
• Example Domain
• Tabular data to HTML tables
• Mocking full web pages from data
• Visualizations
• The Exercises
• Data Cleaning with the Stars
• Normalized alphabetical titles
• Make your own delimiters
• Finding needles in haystacks (TODO)
• Shakespeare’s longest word
• Changing phone format (TODO)
• Telephone game
• Ordering names and dates (TODO)
• Year, months, days
• Names
• Preparing for a spreadsheet
• Dating, Associated Press Style (TODO)
• Scenario
• The AP Date format
• Real-world considerations
• The limits of regex
• Sorting a police blotter
• Sloppy copy-and-paste
• Start loose and simple
• Conclusion
• Converting XML to tab-delimited data
• The payments XML
• The pattern
• Add more delimitation
• Cleaning up Microsoft Word HTML (TODO)
• Switching visualizations (TODO)
• A visualization in Excel
• From Excel to Google Static Chart
• From Google Static Charts to Google Interactive Charts
• Cleaning up OCR Text (TODO)
• Scenario
• Cheat Sheet
• Moving forward
• Additional references and resources