Today I learned about regex. Before joining the Data School I had never heard of it before so it was my first time experiencing it.
What is Regex?: A regular expression (also called regex or regexp) is a way to describe a pattern. It is used to locate or validate specific strings or patterns of text in a sentence, document, or any other character input.
Here is the link for Alteryx Challenge 121 for you to follow along.
The first use for Regex came with identifying the rows that started with a number
As you can see the rows are formatted such that there is a row about the stadium and then the following rows are information about the stadium.
The regex I used to do this is : (^\d+)\.
This takes each row and checks if it starts with 1 or more numerical values and ends with a ".". Allowing me to extract each stadium and city.
My second use of regex in this challenge was to remove the numbers.
The regex I used to do this is : ([A-Z].+)
This takes any capitalized letters from A-Z followed by 1 or more of anything.
My third use of regex in this challenge was to separate the numbers from capacity.
The regex I used to do this is : (\d+,?\d+)
This takes 1 or more digits, potentially followed by a "," , followed by 1 or more digits.
My 4th use of regex was to extract the date each game was played on.
The regex I used to do this is : \((.+)\)
This essentially pulls out 1 or more of anything that is surrounded by parenthesis.
The last time I used regex to complete this challenge is to replace the year in the date.
After using the datetime tool to change the format of the dates in RegExOut1_2 all of the years were 1400. This needs to be replaced with 2018.
A simple use of regex to replace 1400 with 2018
That's it all the regex I used to complete this challenge. Goodluck completing the rest of it yourself.