First impressions of regular expressions are rarely positive. They look arcane, a throwback to the early decades of modern computing, when GUIs and object-oriented programming were a distant future. However, once you get past its look and feel, regular expressions give you serious power to search, filter, and manipulate text and numbers with speed and minimal code.
Once you reach a foundational understanding, regular expressions are often quicker to write than their equivalent R native code. You don’t need to remember ...
