Have you ever thought regex was hard? Have you ever wished there was an easier way to do it?

Come with me as I teach you how to both be better at regex and also do powerful things by keeping your queries simple. How do we do that? The same way we eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

Doing complicated regex work with multiple simple regex matches

Example files end in name.example.txt Matching regex patterns (single vs step) are contained in name.regex.(single|step).txt

Regexes are shown as: Regex -> replacement Note that any replacement surrounded by () is blank, and if there is text in the replacement it is explanatory. ([\w\s]*) is an invalid replacement anyway. In some cases, the grave accent will be used to surround regexes or replacements which start or end with spaces

Useful sites: http://www.regular-expressions.info/ - learning http://regexpal.com/ - testing regexes https://regex101.com/ - testing regexes http://regexper.com/ - visualizing regex http://jsonlint.com/ - validating json (for one example)