Introduction to Regular Expressions

Tutors

Markus Fritz, Toby Hodges & Mike Smith

Overview

Do you often work with lots of data files on the computer, are you often trying to spot particular files or lines of text in them that are important for you?

If so, then using regular expressions could save you a lot of time and frustration!

Regular expressions (regex/REs) are a language designed to describe patterns of characters that you want to match in a body of text. For example, if you want to extract every Ensembl Gene ID in a GFF file, find tandem repeats in a large set of sequences, or extract every email address in a large document, REs are the perfect tool. REs are incorporated into a wide range of software and programming languages, and a knowledge of regular expressions can be extremely helpful in computational biology.

This 4-hour workshop will provide an introduction to REs and cover some of the simple but powerful ways that these can be used to find patterns in large volumes of text data. The workshop will be interactive and driven by examples to demonstrate how you might use regular expressions in your work.

Bookings