Regex for Rockstars

You’re not a regex noob. You know about quantifiers like ?, *, and +. You also know about tokens like \w, \s, and \d. It’s time, now, to take your regex skills to the next level with some advanced concepts like grouping, capturing, and lookbehinds. Get ready to stand above your peers in a big way.

Regex intimidates people, and rightfully so. It’s complicated and isn’t always very readable for humans. It really takes some work to get your head around and truly understand regular expressions. This session is for people who know basic regex concepts and want to take their learning to the next level. Regex is like chess in that it’s easy to learn, but very hard to master. I’ll be teaching attendees some advanced moves to help them accelerate their learning and start doing some really cool things with regex. Anybody can write $number -match '\d', but not everyone can isolate the third octet out of an IP address.

I’ve done a lot of work with regex the last few years parsing logs, evaluating input, etc., and as a result, I’ve become very proficient. I’m a go-to resource on my team at Microsoft, and in the PowerShell community for regex, and I really enjoy tackling regex challenges.

I also submitted a “Regex for Complete Noobs” session which I have given before to a small user group, and is available on YouTube. I’d love to give Regex for Complete Noobs and for Rockstars back to back, but obviously there’s a limited number of spots, and I’m sure a ton of incredible proposals.