Explore JavaScript regular expressions: learn about regex history, create patterns with special characters, parse data, and match passwords/emails, gaining comprehensive text processing skills.

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Regular Expressions, also known as Regex, come in handy in a multitude of text processing scenarios. Regex defines a search pattern using symbols and allows you to find matches within strings. The applications of this span from software engineering to data science and beyond.

In this course, you will begin with an introduction to regex, its history, and various types of regular expressions. 

You will then learn how to create your own regular expressions using various techniques and special characters. In the latter half of the course, you will explore RegExp Objects, how to parse data, turn phrases into an array of strings, and lastly password and email pattern matching.

By the end of this course, you will be a regular expressions expert.

JavaScript Regular Expressions in Detail

# Problem statement 

For the third exercise, let’s try to do something more practical. As the title suggests, you can easily use regular expressions to parse dates, which means you can grab a string that represents a date and turn it into the correct `Date` object.

Of course, there are a variety of libraries published out there that actually deal with this in all the right ways, but, because we’re trying to understand the power of RegExps, we’ll just ignore that fact for the time being.


The exercise will consist of creating a function that can successfully turn any of the following strings into a correctly set `Date` object:


- 2019-10-24
- Dec 23rd, 2019

We could get crazy and try to go for many other formats, but, for the sake of understanding the basics, this will do. Remember, your code needs to parse those strings and create a valid `Date` object, which means that you need to capture specific parts of the string and parse them accordingly.

If you think about it, the logic for this function is simple. Just capture the three different parts of the date (year, month, and date) and return the new object using those captured values. The key, though, is to create the correct set of regular expressions.

# Solution 


Here is the full code for the script:





Explore how we can parse dates and create Date objects by using regular expressions.

The Beginning of Regular Expressions

The Anatomy of Regular Expressions

The RegExp Object

Thinking in Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions in the Wild

Wrapping Up

Parsing Dates

Problem statement