Chapter 5: Using Regular Expressions in Power BI

Often, many data cleansing tasks involve carrying out complex searches and substitutions between strings. The usual search and replace tools are sometimes not enough to get the desired results. For instance, let's suppose you need to match strings, not in an exact way (for instance, via equality conditions) but using similar criteria between them. Knowing how to use tools such as regular expressions (alias regex) can make all the difference in projects that require high-quality data. Thanks to R and Python, you can add these tools to your arsenal.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• A brief introduction to regexes
• Validating data using regex in Power BI
• Loading complex log files using regex in Power BI
• Extracting values from text using regex in Power BI