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Regular Expressions: Luísa Coheur

introduction to regular expressions

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14 views22 pages

Regular Expressions: Luísa Coheur

introduction to regular expressions

Uploaded by

tomjacinti
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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And now, for something...

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS
Luísa Coheur
Overview
— Learning objectives
— Topics
— Regular Expressions
— Key takeaways
— Suggested readings
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES

— After this class, students should be able to know how


to apply Regular Expressions and understand how useful
they can be
TOPICS
Overview
— Learning objectives
— Topics
— Regular Expressions
— Key takeaways
— Suggested readings
APPROACH: RULE-BASED

— First NLP systems were rule-based (hand-crafted)


— There are many frameworks that allow us to craft
rules, which can be very sophisticated
— We will focus on Regular Expressions
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

— Regular expressions, sometimes known as regex or re,


can be used for:
— searching
— matching, and
— manipulating text
— First NLP systems, as ELIZA, were totally based on
regular expressions
— Currently, regular expressions can be combined with
more sophisticated techniques, but are still useful
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

— RE are case sensitive


— RE always match the biggest string
— Characters inside braces [] specify a disjunction of
characters to match:
— Example:
— [ola]pp means “o”, “l” or “a” and will match “opp”, “lpp”
and “app” and not “olapp”;
— Instead of [ABCDEFG], you can use [A–G] and
instead of [0123...9] you can use [0-9]
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

— • means any character


— Example:
— a.c represents abc, aac, acc, adc, a1c, a*c, etc.
— Considering what appears before:
— ? means zero or one
— * means zero or more (the wild card)
— + means one or more
— Example:
— a? represents ε (empty string) and a
— a* represents ε, a, aa, aaa, aaaa, ...
— aa* represents a, aa, aaa, aaa, …
— [ab]* represents aaa, abab, bbb, ...
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

— ^ indicates the beginning of a line


— $ indicates the end of a line.
— | stands for the disjunction
— () groups tokens
— {n} = n occurrences of previous element
— {n,m} = between n and m occurrences of previous
element
— {n,} =a t least n occurrences of previous element
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

— \d represents any digit


— \D means any character that is not a digit
— \w means any alpha-numeric character or a space
— \W means any character that is not alpha-numeric
— \s means any space (tab, blank, ...)
— \S means any character that is not a space
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

— \*, \., \? represent, respectively, the special


characters *, . and ?
— \n, \t represent a newline and tab
— [] and ^ can also be used to declare characters that
should not appear in the RE.
— Example:
— [^a] means any character, except a
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS: APPLICATIONS

— Text Cleaning
— Removing HTML Tags from Web Scraped Data:
— A regex pattern like /<[^>]+>/g can be used to find and
remove all HTML tags (g means “everywhere”)
— Pattern Recognition/data extraction
— Identifying Email Addresses:
— The regex pattern \b[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-
Z|a-z]{2,}\b matches most email address formats
— Extracting Dates:
— A regex can help identify and extract the various formats of
dates, useful for timeline analysis or event tracking
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS: APPLICATIONS

— Spam Detection:
— Regular expressions can be instrumental in identifying
common characteristics of spam messages, such as
excessive use of capital letters, the presence of certain
phrases (e.g., “BUY NOW”, “FREE”, “CLICK HERE”), or
suspicious URLs
ACTIVE LEARNING MOMENT
EXERCISE

— Fill in the table, one letter in each cell


— Regular expressions indicate the letters that should
appear in each column/line.
— Example:
— First line: you might have an H in the first cell and an E in the

second, or an L in each cell or, at least, an O in one of the


cells:
EXERCISE
KEY TAKEWAYS
KEY TAKEWAYS

— The syntax of Regular Expressions and understand that


they are still very useful in NLP, even in the Deep
Learning era
SUGGESTED READINGS
READINGS
— Sebenta: chapter about Regular Expressions
— Jurafsky: 2.1

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