Introduction to the Course

This course is a great way to improve our programming skills by familiarizing ourselves with regular expressions. Regular expressions specify a search pattern that we use for pattern matching in strings. They are not only important for writing parsers, but also for validating data such as an input from a file or user.

This course primarily focuses on using regular expressions in the C# programming language. However, we can also apply the concepts learned here to other modern programming languages and frameworks, like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, Visual Basic, Perl, and PHP.

Before we use regular expressions, we need to understand what they are and why we should care about them. We might be surprised by how much text processing and validation we can accomplish with them.

In this course, we address the following questions:

1. What are regular expressions?

2. What are the common and practical applications of regular expressions?

3. What are the building blocks of regular expressions like character types, whitespaces, and character classes?

4. How do we use regular expression APIs in C#?

5. How do we use regular expressions in string methods?

6. How do we use the Regex and Match classes?

7. How do we create regular expression patterns?

8. How do we use flags while creating regular expressions?

This course is perfect for programmers and application developers who want to learn the usage of regular expressions with C# for practical purposes.

As software engineers or programmers, we are likely to come across problems in parsing useful data like dates, phone numbers, or zip codes from text files. Regular expressions can serve us well in these scenarios.

This course is for intermediate to expert level programmers. To understand the concepts covered in this course, you should already be familiar with C# Programming and have some prior experience with .NET projects.