JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Regular expressions are a useful tool for dealing with text data. They allow us to slice and dice strings, and useful extract information in our applications.

Regex is also complex, and many developers will spend their entire career looking up even the most trivial of regex operations. This course will help improve your regex skills, and teach a solid core of useful tools that you can use every day with confidence!

In this lesson we'll learn two ways to construct a Regular Expression in Javascript, explore the methods available to us directly from the RegExp constructor, use Regular Expressions with String.prototype methods, and build a simple regex highlighter.

Get Started with Regular Expressions in JavaScript

The simplest use of Regular Expressions is to find a plain text pattern. In this lesson we'll look at at finding plain text patterns as well as using the metacharacter "." and how to escape a metacharacter.

Find Plain Text Patterns using Regular Expressions

Regular Expression Quantifiers allow us to identify a repeating sequence of characters of minimum and maximum lengths.  In this lesson we'll use Regular Expression Quantifiers to match repeated patterns, common Quantifier patterns, and using shorthand for those common Quantifier patterns.

Use Regular Expressions to Find Repeated Patterns

Regular Expression Character Classes define a group of characters we can use in conjunction with quantifiers.

Use Character Classes in Regular Expressions

In this lesson we'll learn shorthands for common character classes as well as their negated forms.

Use Shorthand Regular Expression Character Classes

In this lesson we'll capture groups of characters we wish to match, use  quantifiers with those groups, and use references to those groups in String.prototype.replace.

Create Capture Groups in Regular Expressions

Lookaheads allow us to match a pattern followed by another pattern without including the second pattern in our match.

Use Lookaheads in Regular Expressions

Regular Expression Word Boundaries allow to perform "whole word only" searches within our source string.

Find the Start and End of Words with Regular Expression Word Boundaries

Regular Expression Backreferences provide us a method to match a previously captured pattern a second time.

Match the Same String Twice with Backreferences in Regular Expressions

We can identify the start and end of a line using Line Anchors.  When dealing with multiple line matches we can utilize the multiline regular expression flag.

Regex in Javascript

Joe Maddalone

Course Content