Whew, thank you but I think some of the veterans here would disagree with that part where you used ‘regex’ and ‘sophisticated’ in the same sentence. :grinning_face_with_sweat:
Regular expressions are one of the first real-world skills you’ll learn no matter the language or platform you tackle, from Python and PowerShell’s don’t-call-me-C# to Airtable’s JS-based formulae, Swift, etc. And no matter the environment, your regex-taming ability will be among the biggest,baddest, and heaviest-hitting tools in your arsenal.
Getting a hang of it will inevitably leave a long trail of ones and zeroes in your wake; all smashed to bits, naturally, but sooner or later, you’ll realize that half of the places you busted into were waiting for you to knock, and the other half moved their valuables to another address… in 2005.
So, yeah, you can certainly crack a lot of things with Regex, just don’t forget to keep learning after you get the hang of its parsing logic as there’s a whole other world of language processing beyond it and the most difficult Regex skill is knowing when to abstain from using Regex and why.
Everything else comes down to abstracting your targets from their surroundings and that’s what the brain is the best at doing, anyway.
As for a good resource for learning, would you rather learn by example or trial-and-error? Maybe a mix of both? Assuming you’re not looking for book recommendations, RegExr will probably have content to your liking. It’s also a place where you can occasionally encounter what I’d dare label a “sophisticated” regex. The way you can tell it apart from the rest is that there’s just no way of understanding wtf is going on without tracing the interpreter’s path, character by character.
