Regular Expressions (Regex) for Beginners
Regular expressions (regex) are used to to extract information or patterns from text. They are used by programming languages, AV/EDR software, application whitelisting software, data loss prevention (DLP) software, personally identifiable information scanning software, and more. While simple in concept, regex can become quite complex depending on what strings of text need to be extracted. I'll be using regex101.com to show my examples, but there are a ton of great resources and "testers" available for free on the Internet. Tokens are how regular expressions are defined. There are dozens available, and we'll get to them in a minute, but nothing is more basic in regex than just typing the exact string you're looking for. Example 1 - string If you're searching for the string "fire" in a given sentence, you would make your regular expression fire . We can see here that this regex pattern patches on lines "fire", "firetruck", ...