So let's look at what regex means.
Basically, it really is about mastering patterns and validations.
So what are regular expressions?
Well, they are a sequence of characters that define a search pattern.
And these patterns, they are used to match and manipulate strings based on specific criteria, allowing
for powerful text processing and data validation.
So you can see a little image here down below.
And it looks really like super weird, right?
As a beginner, it's definitely not easy to understand what's going on.
But step by step we're going to really dive into what all of that means, and it will make a lot of
sense once we're done with this chapter.
So why would you use regular expressions?
Well, first of all, to validate inputs such as emails, URLs and so forth.
So we can ensure that user entered data adheres to the required format, such as checking if an email
address or URL is valid, and this can also be a phone number or any type of validation that you want
to do.
And then it's also useful to search and replace text so we can efficiently find and replace specific
patterns within large texts, streamlining data cleaning and modification tasks.
So this will be useful not only for coding, but it will also be useful for you in general when you
are working with longer or bigger texts.
So then it also helps you to extract specific patterns.
So it's there to identify and extract meaningful data such as phone numbers or dates from unstructured
text to further process it.
So the cool thing about regex is that it's a universal tool used across many programming languages,
including, but not only limited to C sharp, C plus plus, Java, JavaScript, and Python, and you
will come across it quite a bit when you're working with validations.
And I just thought it would be a great idea for you to know how regex works, so let's dive deeper into
it in the next videos.