Download - The Bastards Book of Regular Expressions

Matching any letter, any numberOf course, we’ll need to work with actual alphabetical letters, numbers, and symbols other thanwhitespace and newlines. Regular expressions have a set of shortcuts and syntax for this purpose.The numeric character classUsing our friend the backslash, we can turn a literal letter into a special character to match numbers.When the letter d is preceded by a backslash, the pattern no longer matches the literal letter d, butany numerical digit from 0 to 9:\d+Matches:There are 10010 sheepWe refer to \d as a “character class” or “character set” because it affects a set of characters. In thiscase, \d matches the set (i.e. “class”) of characters that are numbers.Let’s try out the \d in a simple exercise.Exercise: Redact the numbersGiven this phrase:The robbery was reported on January 12, 2013. At 9:40, the suspect is alleged to haveentered the pizzeria at 120 Broadway and stolen 9 bags of oregano.Replace all the numbers with the letter X63