Powerful text searching and matching with Regexes at UON Callaghan

Why do this course?

Have you ever wanted to extract phone numbers out of a block of unstructured text? Or email addresses. Or find all the words that start with “e” and end with “ed”, no matter their length? Or search through DNA sequences for a pattern? Or extract coordinates from GPS data?

Regular Expressions (regexes) are a powerful way to handle a multitude of different types of data. They can be used to find patterns in text and make sophisticated replacements. Think of them as find and replace on steroids. Come along to this workshop to learn what they can do and how to apply them to your research.

Who should take this course?

Regular Expressions are little known outside of computer science and enthusiasts, but they are incredibly powerful for analysis and manipulation of any data stored in text format. As such this course will benefit researchers from a variety of disciplines spanning both the humanities and the sciences.

You’ll learn how to:

• Comprehend and apply the syntax of regular expressions

• Use the http://regexr.com tool to test a regular expression against some text

• Construct simple regular expressions to find capitalised words; all numbers; all words that start with a specific set of letters, etc. in a block of text

• Craft and test a progressively more complex regular expression

• Find helpful resources covering regular expressions on the web

The Intersect approach to training

At Intersect, we work closely with our member universities to develop and deliver training that targets the day-to-day software and technology problems that researchers face. We deliver hands-on courses in a relaxed setting with knowledgeable, helpful trainers who are themselves researchers and who know how researchers work. 

Download the course outline.

For more information visit Learn.intersect.org.au