Regular Expressions

Everyone has at some point run up against the limitations of searching files and manipulating them in bulk. This becomes a significant problem when you are attempting to integrate data from multiple sources that are inconsistently formatted. If dates are written 2015/02/18 in one file and 02/18/2015 in another, it would be great if you could make them all 2015-02-18 without changing them all manually. Regular expressions allow you to set rules to find complicated phrases in files.

Topics

1. Introduction
2. Simple strings
3. [Harder strings]
4. [Using regex in bash]
5. [Using regex in python]

Other Resources

• Motivation
• Reference
• Discussion
• Instructor's Guide