Regular Expressions 101: A Beginner's Guide

Regular expressions (regex) are powerful tools for pattern matching and text manipulation. They can seem intimidating at first, but the basics are easy to learn.

Essential Patterns

• \d - Any digit (0-9)
• \w - Any word character (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _)
• \s - Any whitespace
• . - Any character except newline
• * - Zero or more of previous
• + - One or more of previous
• ? - Zero or one of previous

Common Use Cases

Email validation, phone number extraction, URL parsing, and search/replace operations.