Class 7
The ETL Process: Regular Expressions
Description
This session introduces regular expressions as a method for identifying, extracting, and validating patterns within text. Regular expressions are important because many business datasets contain useful information embedded within identifiers, descriptions, documents, and other fields that are not consistently structured.
Motivation
How do we extract structure from unstructured information?
Review
Previous sessions focused primarily on transforming information that already has recognizable rows, columns, and variables. This session begins the transition toward unstructured data by showing how patterns can be used to impose structure on textual information.