New Skill: Regular Expressions

This week I learned something new about the search field in text editing applications. Like using the search or find function to navigate big chunks of text regular expressions allow you to search through a document but also provide a number of modifiers for search functions.

I started my exploration of this new topic by watching tutorials on The Coding Train playlist for regular expressions.

Once I felt comfortable around the basics of regular expressions I tried out RegEx golf which creates a game out of regular creating regular expressions. Like golf the goal is to have the lowest score, so the expressions you create are scored on their length. The shorter and more efficient the better. I made my way through the first few levels, first finding rules in sets, such as selecting words with only characters a-f, or words beginning with a particular character. The later levels were much more puzzling and I was not able to recognize the reoccurring patterns in the sets.

Trying another game the beginning level of Regular Expression Crossword left me deeply confused.

I can see the usefulness of regular expressions and will need to continue my readings and practice of them.