In this chapter, you will be introduced to regular expressions (or regex in short). You will learn about some real-world problems that can be solved by using regular expressions and the basic building blocks of regular expressions.

We will be covering the following topics in this chapter:

• Introduction to regular expressions
• A brief history of regular expressions
• The various flavors of regular expressions
• What type of problems need regular expressions to solve
• The basic rules of writing regular expressions
• Standard regular expression meta characters
• Basic regular expression examples