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

The `exec` method is potentially the only method you will care about 90% of the time when dealing with this object. However, there are other methods that might come in handy when trying to do some advanced operations with regular expressions.
# The `test` method 

The `test` method is similar to the previous one, but it only returns `true` or `false` depending on whether there are any matches or not. The other methods available from this object are actually internally used by other objects, such as `String`, to perform the matches. 

# Overriding the `RegExp` class

You can, however, override these methods by extending the `RegExp` class and adding your own logic on top of their behavior. These methods are:

- **match**: It is very similar to the `exec` method. However, it is called internally by the `String` class method, `match`.

- **matchAll**: This method attempts to improve upon the previous one by returning an iterator instead of a simple list of results, allowing you to use a `for…of` loop with the returned entity. You can say that this is just syntactic sugar, but it helps keep the code clean.

- **replace**: This is the method called by the `replace` method of the `String` object.

- **search**: Again used by the `String` class, it returns the index at which the pattern is matched against a given string.

- **split**: Used by the `String` method when its `split` method is called. 

In any case, these methods are not accessible easily to the user. In fact, the only easy way to override them and provide custom behavior for them is to extend the RegExp class, as seen below.


Familiarize yourself with the test method and learn how to override the RegExp class to provide custom behavior. 

The Beginning of Regular Expressions

The Anatomy of Regular Expressions

The RegExp Object

Thinking in Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions in the Wild

Wrapping Up

The Other Methods

The `test` method

The Other Methods

The test method

The `test` method