Regular Expressions and Working with Text Strings

Workshop description:

In R, strings are used for storing text. Most of the data that we work with contains strings, either in object or file names or as values in data frames or other tabular formats. Regular expressions are specially encoded strings of characters that match patterns in other strings. Being able to write regular expressions is an underutilized, valuable skill that can save us time and lines of code when we need to match, extract, or transform text by matching words, characters, and patterns. If a text pattern can be described verbally, we can most likely write a regular expression to match it. For example, we can use regular expressions to match dates, email addresses, strings that start or end with a particular character, etc. This talk will cover the building blocks of regular expressions and how we can use them in R to work with strings, focusing on packages built specifically for string manipulation. This talk is meant to introduce regex to those without prior knowledge and provide a boost for people already familiar.

Link will be posted closer to the event.