Regular expressions are a powerful tool for extracting and analyzing text. However, the syntax of regular expressions can be complex and difficult to understand. In my previous Webinar, I introduced the basics of regular expressions, including the simplest metacharacters and character classes. In this Webinar, we'll build on that, discussing groups, backreferences and lookahead/lookbehind.

The plan, as with most of my Webinars, is to present a lot of examples and explanations, and to invite Q&A from the participants.

If you have struggled to understand how to go beyond simple uses of ., +, and * in your regular expressions, and want to see not just how regexp syntax works but how it can make you more productive, I think that you'll get a lot out of this Webinar. They're always fun for me to hold, particularly when I get questions from attendees.

I'll be using Python for most of my examples, but you don't have to be a Python programmer to participate. On the contrary, I'd love to have developers who use other languages add to the fun.