Regular expressions

If you are not familiar with regular expressions, I request you to spend time learning them. Learning and using regular expressions effectively is one of the most rewarding skills that you will gain. During most of the code review sessions, the first thing that I comment on is how a piece of code can be converted to a single line of regular expression (or RegEx). If you study popular JavaScript libraries, you will be surprised to see how ubiquitous RegEx are. Most seasoned engineers rely on RegEx primarily because once you know how to use them, they are concise and easy to test. However, learning RegEx will take a significant amount of effort and time. A regular expression is a way to express a pattern to match strings of text. The expression itself consists of terms and operators that allow us to define these patterns. We'll see what these terms and operators consist of shortly.

In JavaScript, there are two ways to create a regular expression: via a regular expression...