Practically Regexing: A demo of demos
Channel: PowerShell.org
Date: 30/12/2021

Presented by Anthony Howell
If you haven't mastered regex yet, I'm sure that it is one of the things on your bucket list. If not for its usefulness, for being able to proudly exclaim: 'I understand!' after carefully examining a character vomit. To fully grasp how effective regex can be, strap in for a full demo of examples.

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Regex is used for string matching, thats cool, so what? PowerShell is object-oriented, who needs to worry about how strings are formatted?

Maybe you work in Active Directory, ever need to parse DNs or other identifiers? What about SQL and parsing connection strings? Or what if you are an application administrator and you need to parse some logs? Or heck, lets talk meta PowerShell regex and do some find and replacing of variables in a folder of scripts! Yes, there is plenty of regex to go around!

But! Even if there are lots of strings to regularly express, there are also times when regular expressions are not the best tool for the job. I want to make sure and cover a couple of examples of terrible things to regex and explain why (with some really gross regex).

Now this isn't an introduction to regex (for that I would recommend checking out Mark Minasi's talk from 2018), this is a talk full of explained and practical regex examples designed to not only make your life as a PowerShell scripter easier, but to also give you the motivation to learn more.