Regular Expressions Pattern and String Matching in Text

What is a RegEx  “Find” option but fancier  Match a “pattern” to a “string”  Cheat sheet:  Different coding languages have different RegEx syntax  But you can usually set them to read any of the other syntaxes  My favorite RegEx tester is:

Find any word that starts with a capital letter:

Find any word that starts with a capital letter and then a lower case letter:

Match a phrase that might be arranged differently:

Or dates… You can get about as fancy with this as you’d like Useful to parse larger chunks of text entered by date or number

Example Uses: Syria Militant Networks and Violence in Syria What sorts of networks are likely to result in infighting as opposed to alliances?

Example Uses:.gov Searching terabytes of this…..

To get counts: To say something about government attention to different issues 2008 Agency Relative Emphasis

RegEx: what it isn’t good for  Time consuming to do pattern matching over large data  When you have a lot of variation in spelling or phrasing  Fuzzy Sets!  Useful reference for fuzzy matches: bloggers.com/fuzzy-string-matching-a-survival-skill-to-tackle- unstructured-information/ bloggers.com/fuzzy-string-matching-a-survival-skill-to-tackle- unstructured-information/