This tutorial does not aim to teach you regular expressions. For this, there are plenty of resources online, from free tutorials for beginners to premium courses for advanced users.
Below we provide a quick reference to the main RegEx patterns that will help you get a grasp of the basics. It may also work as your cheat sheet when studying further examples. If you are comfortable with regular expressions, you can jump straight to the RegExp functions. Escapes a period so you can find the literal ". Character classes Using these patterns, you can match elements of different character sets. Quantifiers are special expressions that specify the number of characters to match.
A quantifier always applies to the character before it. Grouping constructs are used to capture a substring from the source string, so you can perform some operation with it. Alternation OR construct The alternation operand enables the OR logic, so you can match either this or that element.
Lookaround constructs are helpful when you want to match something that is or isn't followed or preceded by something else. These expressions are sometimes called "zero-width assertions" or "zero-width match" because they match a position rather than actual characters. Now that you know the essentials, let's move on to the most interesting part - using regexes on real data to parse strings and find the required information. If you need more details about the syntax, the Microsoft guide on Regular Expression Language may prove helpful.
As already mentioned, Microsoft Excel has no built-in RegEx functions. To enable regular expressions, we've created three custom VBA functions. You can copy the codes from the below-linked pages or from our sample workbook , and then paste in your own Excel files. This section explains the inner mechanics and may be interesting to those who want to know exactly what happens at the backend. To start using regular expressions in VBA, you need to either activate the RegEx object reference library or use the CreateObject function.
To save you the trouble of setting the reference in the VBA editor, we chose the latter approach. Excel VBA implements the essential regex patterns, but it does lack many advanced features available in. NET, Perl, Java, and other regex engines. The function's code is here. Given that each SKU starts with 2 capital letters, followed by a hyphen, followed by 4 digits, you can match them using the following expression.
With the pattern established, start typing a formula like you normally do, and function's name will appear in the list suggested by Excel's AutoComplete:. This ensures that the cell address will remain unchanged when you copy the formula to other cells:.
The RegExpExtract function searches for substrings that match a regular expression and extracts all matches or specific match.
You can get the code of the function here. Taking our example a little further, let's extract invoice numbers. For this, we'll be using a very simple regex that matches any 7-digit number:. You are free to choose between the three editions also see feature comparison grid :. All editions support batch replace jobs , command line switches and include a regular expression tester.
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