hands-on lab

Using Regular Expressions Effectively in the Real World

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 1 hour
Students: 1,457
Rating: 4.4/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
Learn and validateUse validations to check your solutions every step of the way.
See resultsTrack your knowledge and monitor your progress.

Description

A Regular Expression is a tool for searching, processing, and manipulating text. Regular expressions have a long history and can be found in just about every popular programming language. They are widely used, and whether you are a developer or an engineer, you should be able to recognize and work with them.

In this lab, you will see real-world scenarios for using regular expressions, be introduced to some advanced features, and you will learn how to decide whether they are a good solution for different types of problems. 

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner level lab, you will be able to:

  • Use regular expressions to extract data from a log file
  • Use a regular expression to validate passwords and dates
  • Recognize situations where regular expressions are a good solution

Intended Audience

  • Developers
  • Engineers

Prerequisites

This lab builds upon the labs below and it is recommended to complete them before starting this lab:

Familiarity with the Python programming language will be beneficial but is not required.

The following course can be used to fulfill the prerequisite:

Updates

January 11th, 2022 - Improved use of forwardslash and backslash terminology

October 6th, 2021 - Updated link for Apache doc

February 12th, 2021 - Clarified the difference between named capture groups and lookarounds

February 11th, 2021 - Removed unnecessary forward slash escape character

Covered topics

Lab steps

Using Regular Expressions Effectively in the Real World