I’m going to use python. Regex can be used by using the re library. You should not refer to this post as these are just notes, it would be better to follow the actual documentation of the library.
To use regex, which uses backslashes \ we must use raw python strings like r"\n".
. matches anything but a newline
\d matches 0-9 while \D matches anything but digits. Similarly, \w matches word chars. Usually, capital letters are complement of these sets.
\s matches whitespace characters like return, newline, tab etc.
\w{x} would match word chars x times.
^ matches start and $ matches end.
This can be used for exact match.
[] matches a set.
Important point to note here would be to match . inside set, we should not use \. since slash will also be matched here, because special characters lose their special meaning here but character classes don’t like \w.
Inside, ^ means negated character set.
There are also ranges like, a-z, A-Z, 0-9 that can be used in the set.
\{x,y} matches repetitions between x and y inclusive. w{3,5} : It will match the character w 3,4 or 5 times. Leaving y means atleast x repetitions.
\d* will match digits 0 or more times.
w+ will match w one or more times.
? match zero or one time.
(?:...) is a non capturing group, useful when you only need to check if it is there or not.
() is capturing, can be used with \1 etc eg. (\d)\1: It can match 00, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88 or 99. This is called backreferencing.
Backreferencing can be used for conditionally checking r"^\d{2}(-?)\d{2}\1\d{2}\1\d{2}$"
\b means check if it is a word boundary which is first char of string, between word and not word char, or last char in string. note: don’t use ^$ with word boundary.
(Bob|Kevin|Stuart) will match either Bob or Kevin or Stuart
r1(?=r2) Positive lookahead checks if r1 is immediately followed by r2
r1(?!r2) Negative lookahead checks if r1 is not immediately followed by r2
(?<=r2)r1 Positive lookbehind
(?<!r2)r1 negative lookbehind
Non greedy match – use ? to perform non greedy match. <.*> will match <a>b<c>. To only match <a> use <.*?>
Detect HTML links and content: r'<a href="(.*?)".*?>([\w ,./]*)(?=</)'
findall matches in python: re.findall(pattern, text)