Regular expression

Regular expression, or Regex, is a formal language,^(OpenDSA) that consists of a sequence of characters, known as an expression, that point to specific matches or groups of other characters and text.^(RegexBuddy) This is a powerful way to get information from text files, code, spreadsheets, and more,^(RegexOne) and is similar to a programming language, with it’s primary goal is to parse text.^{(Friedl, 2006, p. 1)}