Regular Expressions for Beginners - Universal

Learn how literal characters match exactly in regular expressions using the JavaScript flavor, with global search, case-insensitive options, and backtracking, demonstrated via a Jira example.

Learn how the dot wildcard metacharacter lets regex match any character, demonstrated with literals like car and price formats, and note it can match any character between elements.

Learn to use escaping in regular expressions to treat metacharacters as literals, including escaping dots and slashes, and apply examples that match specific file names and PHP files.

Explore regular expressions across flavors, referencing the msdn website and the dot net framework, with hands-on examples of matching tabs, new lines, and chaining meta characters.

Explore character sets and ranges in regular expressions, using square brackets, symbols, and ranges like A to Z and 0 to 9 to match specific characters.

Learn the negation meta character by using the carrot symbol to match everything not in a set, and review escaping rules for dash, dot, square brackets, and backslashes.

Explore regex shorthands such as digits, words, and whitespace, and their uppercase counterparts. Negate these shorthands in character sets and combine them in practical examples.

Explore quantifiers in regular expressions, including the asterisk, plus, and question mark, to match zero or more, one or more, or optional previous elements.

Explore repetition and metacharacters in regular expressions, using quantifiers like *, +, and ?, plus braces {n,m} to control digits and exact patterns such as zip codes.

Discover how lazy quantifiers match as few occurrences as possible in regex, contrast them with greedy quantifiers, and use ? with plus, asterisk, and curly braces to control repetition.

Master grouping in regular expressions by using parentheses outside character sets to group patterns, and practice with optional prefixes like un to match both happy and unhappy forms.

Leverage the pipe symbol to express alternation, matching left or right expressions with grouping for clarity. Note left-side precedence and eager matching, and apply quantifiers, escapes, and chaining.

Master nesting with alternation by building grouped expressions, using pipe for alternation, and making parts optional with question marks, across languages PHP, JavaScript, Java, and Python.

Explore anchors in regular expressions, using the caret for the start and the dollar for the end of a string or line, and distinguish line versus string matching.

Explore word boundaries in regular expressions by using the \b and \B metacharacters and the \w shorthand. Learn how these patterns match word characters, non word characters, and string edges.

Master backreferences and capturing groups in regular expressions by learning how grouped expressions save matches in memory, reference them, and perform replacements in JavaScript.

Explore non-capturing group expressions to disable back references in regex, turn off default capturing with ?: and learn how to optimize patterns using non-capturing groups in practical examples.

Learn how assertions drive regex results with positive and negative lookahead to require or exclude matches, such as words preceded by a dash or a comma.

Explore lookbehind assertions in regular expressions, compare positive and negative lookbehind and zero-width positions, and understand cross-language support (PHP, Java, Python, Ruby) and the 1% gap with Unix or JavaScript.

Learn how to use regular expressions with any language by applying Unicode encoding, from single-byte and double-byte encoding to variable-byte encoding, using backslash U with four hex digits.

Learn to use unicode with regular expressions to match symbols and accented characters via backslash u codes, and find references to build robust patterns.

Learn to build and validate a US postal code regex that matches five digits with an optional dash and four digits, using anchors and optional capturing for precise matches.

Explore building a password validation system with regular expressions, using anchors, non-space characters, quantifiers, and lookaheads to require uppercase, lowercase, digits, and symbols within 6 to 20 characters.

Learn to build date matching regular expressions, handling two-digit days and months with dash or slash separators, four-digit years, and using anchors to enforce start-to-end matches.

Wraps up the course and invites you to explore other topics such as JavaScript, PHP, object oriented programming, and Python, while encouraging a five star review and helpful feedback.