Learning Regular Expressions

- [Kevin] Regular expressions are an essential skill for any developer or computer programmer to have. They allow you to define text patterns that can be used for a variety of tasks. You can validate data submitted by users, your code can extract parts from longer strings, you can use them to convert data into a new format. They even make it easier to search your own code. In this course, we will learn the fundamentals of writing regular expressions. We will walk through each of the symbols that are the basic building blocks for more complex patterns. Through a series of simple demonstrations, you will learn how to put together an expression and how to anticipate the behavior of the program that will interpret it. Along the way, I will point out a number of pitfalls and common mistakes to avoid. My name is Kevin Skoglund. I've been a web developer for over 15 years, and I use regular expressions all the time, both in my code and to speed up my development. I consider regular expressions an indispensable tool. I'm excited to share what I've learned so that you can use them, too.