Save Hours of Work with RegEx

RegEx is a formidable tool that many just don’t understand, but can save literally thousands of hours of work.

[praetorxyn]

As a software developer, find / replace with RegEx is an absolute life-saver.

[ramiouspj]

The downside of regex is when you have to use it again the next year you have to look up again what you forgot. One of my most common uses of regex is taking large rows of data I need to move to like sql. I use it to do find replace to insert sql command structure around the data for hundreds of rows in mere seconds with notepad++.

[dingokidneys]

I've had to do massive data conversions quite a few times in my working life when we were converting from one system (usually financial system as I'm an accountant) to another and using regex made life a lot easier for me. I'd usually use regex as implemented in Perl or awk as I could write a script to deal with a particular data extract, do test conversions to load data for system testing, then when it came time to do the final data conversion my jobs would load clean every time and I'd then go help someone else with their tasks. Made me look like a god when it was just a matter of using the right tool for the job.

[SquackSpencer]

Just a little heads-up: if you have a string like "foo/bar/delta/pingas/stuff.png", sometimes ".*\/" will grab everything from "foo" to "pingas/".

In this case, adding a ?, as in ".*?\/", will make the selection "lazy", i.e. it will stop at the first "/" it finds.

It's useful if you only want the "foo", for example.

[SmokeytheBeer]

I write regex all the time now for my job after I finally figured it out. Game changer. The biggest problem I have these days is that some files not encoded in UTF-8.

[rishabhprakash]

The one and only thing i hated in my programming life but last week over came and learnt it. Its very helpful even if you just get the essence of it and leave the rest to situational googling.

[abhitruechamp]

I have been searching for years for techtubers like you who would help me in my day-to-day technology use, and I have failed till now. This video is a reminder of that fact.

[hatersgonnahate]

“RegEx” stands for “Regular Expressions”

[toromac]

Love the RegEx. Super powerful when looking for things in log files and such as well

[achrafrhariss]

I use regex in everyday work duties
I love them and every time i learn something new about them

[zinsy]

I started doing regex a couple years ago and really started enjoying it once I started to understand it. I really like the way you broke it down here to hopefully enable more folks to get their feet wet with this. I didn't realize you could remove an enter with \n. I knew what \n was, but never pieced together that it would be placed in the actual search, etc. There are so many random tidbits that can be learned from this over time. I'm glad you made this video to at least help others get started with it or at least motivate to learn a few more things about it. You really don't have to get advanced with this. Even the most basic stuff is so powerful. Just learn basics like stuff shown here and play it by ear from there!

[itzamedave]

Loving the new series of videos and the production quality with FOD effects definitely have come along way in the past year alone 👍

[elkasztano]

Please bear in mind that a dot matches any character. If you want to find a literal dot, you should escape that as well. So it would be better to use "\.png" instead of ".png".

[peterjansen]

Ah, you picked up on it! Awesome, regular expressions are a must master skill for any Linux user. For programming those can be essential too, depending on what kind of software you make.

[IronRex]

🤓Word of advice: Learning about finite automata can demystify a lot about RegEx and its syntax (YMMV)
🤣Word of caution: It is only a matter of time before you start using RegEx for everything. Even for things that would be faster without RegEx. Watch out for that.

[Maleko]

Thank you! I have been wanting to learn RegEx by practicing hands-on with trial and error. I was hoping site like those you linked existed. :)

[drescherjm]

As a c++ programmer and administrator for 25+ years at the day job this is one thing I wish I was better at. I still feel a bit like you mentioned in intro.

[abitterberry]

That's the syntax grep uses right? Gosh that is so useful! regexr is goind to my bookmarks right now!

[danielnolan]

I believe, this is the second RegEx tutorial on YouTube that talks about how groups start and stop selections. Then saves them to variables for later use.

[MaderHaker]

420k subs, nice, every one of those 100% worth for the good job on these videos