Working with RegEx
We are not going to get into the details of regular expressions in this recipe; we are just going to mention concepts that will help you decide when (and when not) to use them.
Regular expressions refer to a set of characters on a particular notation, where each one can have a literal or special meaning (metacharacters); they can be used for pattern recognition within a text, and are very useful for parsing and matching strings in unstructured data. It’s all about determining likenesses or differences between the notation and the real text.
There are many types of syntaxes, based on the processor used, so we are going to focus on the Perl one, which is the one that Alteryx uses (through the Boost library) and one of the most used in general.
One important thing to notice about regular expressions is that they focus on patterns, so if you don’t have a pattern in your text, RegEx won’t be the right method for parsing it.
