I learned regex in a data entry job when receiving spreadsheets of user info they entered themselves. The number of times I went from a 40-minute by-hand solution to a 30-second one was astounding.

Need to clean up capitalization? Regex.

Need to fix all the phone numbers with dashes in them? Regex.

Need to make sure all the emails are valid? Regex.

So many hours of tedium saved. It really is one of the most powerful tools to have in your back pocket.

No I dont do that. Stop asking. That is not me in the picture.

The image wouldn’t load for me but your transcript was perfect, thank you

I’ve been in the industry for about 30 years now, and I still will break out some command line Perl when I need to regex something.

I've never bothered to learn regex because I can do this sort of stuff easily in Python. For any non-trivial job it's better to have things like error handling, statistics, logs and *gasp* readability.

@mac Classic!