Many data science, analyst, and technology professionals have encountered regular expressions at some point. This esoteric, miniature language is used for matching complex text patterns, and looks mysterious and intimidating at first. However, regular expressions (also called “regex”) are a powerful tool that only require a small time investment to learn. They are almost ubiquitously supported wherever there is data.

What are regular expressions? Why are regular expressions useful? How would you use regular expressions in data visualizations?

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