In several library contexts (MarcEdit, for example) , I’ve read or been told “have you tried doing that using Regular Expressions?”. Having no idea what this meant or referred to, I did a little wikipedia-ing and found out a little more about this method of matching text strings. Initial thoughts:
- Yes, I think this can accomplish some important library-related tasks.
- No, I don’t know anything about them.
I’ll chronicle my attempts to understand and explore Regular Expressions on this blog under this heading. I’m doing so with the intended context of MarcEdit, but hope to think of other ways Regular Expressions could be used to do library work.
First, a definition via Wikipedia:
In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means to “match” (specify and recognize) strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters
I’ll jump right in and discuss some special characters that made regular expressions so powerful. I like examples and getting messy, so here we go! I’ve decided to adopt a crime show format genre for my initial explorations. Enjoy!