Regular Expressions (commonly shortened to "Regex") are used to perform powerful searches within strings of text. The capabilities of regex allow specific ranges of characters to be identified, including lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols (and even emoji, if you are so inclined). Even better, areas of text can be captured so that they can be manipulated later on. It's very likely that all of the software you use on a daily basis uses regex in some way.

Regex has a reputation for being supposedly being incredibly complicated, but once you realise how all of its elements are built up, reading and creating patterns will be no problem!

In this book, we will learn every aspect of regex, all the way from a complete beginner to a true master - by the end we will have learned terms such as wildcards and quantifiers, and be able to read and write our own complex patterns.