Coding 101 23: Perl: RegEx Search and Replace

Hosts: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ and Shannon Morse

Guest: Patrick Delahanty

The Code for today’s show is availible at our: Github

Ivory Tower

Let’s talk about Regular Expressions
* In episode 2, we brushed past Regular Expressions … OUR BAD

Defn: At its simplest, A “Regular Expression” or “Regex” is a type of pattern-matching that can be used in searches or find and replace operations.
* In a Regex, each character of the string is its own metacharacter that can be combined with other metacharacters to identify patterns and even context
* Regular Expressions are used in most modern languages, and figure prominently into modern seach engines.

Perl is the standard-bearer for Regular Expressions in .NET, Java, Ruby and others

WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN?!?!?!
* Quite simply… REGEX allows you to find, match and replace patters within any data set.
* It lets you search NOT just complete strings, but parts of strings.
– You can then replace those strings, or parts of strings with other strings.

They’re useful to parse files and provide a powerful search and replace tool.

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