The Power of Regex Unleashed! ✨🔍

Regular expressions, also known as regex, are powerful tools for pattern matching and text manipulation. 🎯

What is Regex?

Regex is a sequence of characters that defines a search pattern. It can be used to match, search, and manipulate text based on specific patterns. 🧩

Why Use Regex?

Regex can be incredibly useful in various scenarios, such as:

• Validating input data
• Extracting specific information from text
• Replacing or modifying text
• Searching for patterns in large datasets

Basic Regex Syntax

Regex patterns are composed of a combination of characters and special symbols. Here are some commonly used symbols:

• .: Matches any single character.
• *: Matches zero or more occurrences of the preceding character.
• +: Matches one or more occurrences of the preceding character.
• []: Matches any single character within the brackets.
• ^: Matches the start of a line.
• $: Matches the end of a line.

Examples

Let's look at a few examples to understand how regex works:

• To match any email address, you can use the pattern ^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$.

  • Breakdown:
    • ^: Matches the start of the line.
    • [a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+: Matches one or more occurrences of any letter, digit, dot, underscore, percent, plus, or minus.
    • @: Matches the "@" symbol.
    • [a-zA-Z0-9.-]+: Matches one or more occurrences of any letter, digit, dot, or hyphen.
    • \.: Matches a dot.
    • [a-zA-Z]{2,}: Matches two or more occurrences of any letter.
    • $: Matches the end of the line.

• To extract all URLs from a text, you can use the pattern (https?|ftp)://[^\s/$.?#].[^\s]*.

  • Breakdown:
    • (https?|ftp): Matches either "http", "https", or "ftp".
    • ://: Matches "://" literally.
    • [^\s/$.?#]: Matches any character except whitespace, "/", "$", ".", "?", or "#".
    • .: Matches a dot.
    • [^\s]*: Matches zero or more occurrences of any character except whitespace.

• To format phone numbers in a consistent way, you can use the pattern (\d{3})(\d{3})(\d{4}) and the replacement string ($1) $2-$3.

  • Breakdown:
    • (\d{3}): This part of the regex matches three consecutive digits. The \d represents any digit from 0 to 9, and the {3} specifies that we want exactly three occurrences of the preceding pattern. The parentheses () are used to capture this group of three digits.
    • (\d{3}): This part of the regex is similar to the previous one. It also matches three consecutive digits and captures them in a group.
    • (\d{4}): This part of the regex matches four consecutive digits and captures them in a group.

const phoneNumber = '1234567890'
const formattedPhoneNumber = phoneNumber.replace(/(\d{3})(\d{3})(\d{4})/, '($1) $2-$3')

console.log(formattedPhoneNumber) // Output: (123) 456-7890

Conclusion

Regex is a powerful tool that can save you time and effort when working with text. By mastering regex, you can unlock a whole new level of text manipulation possibilities. So go ahead, dive into the world of regex and unleash its power! 💪🚀