discussion 1

Running head: REGULAR EXPRESSION

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS 2

Regular Expressions

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In data analytics, regular expressions refer to a series of numbers used in matching patterns of different data during big data analysis. The technique developed with the formalization of language that created an opportunity for regex (Srinivasan et al., 2016). The patterns created from these regular expressions are very useful in managing data through the matching of data with the same characters. Mastering of regular expression eases the process of analyzing data and thus one can save time from these techniques especially when handling large amounts of data.

The regular expression technique is useful in data analytics by a number of reasons. Regex is useful in finding particular files from databases since they are interactive in searches related to the data. Additionally, regex allows editing of the data and thus the organization's data can be kept updated every time in case of new data entries (Wang et al., 2019). Secondly, regular expressions in data analytics are important in data scraping. The technique ensures access to particular information from the web or any data stored on the computer.

There are different types of regular expressions that differ in their roles during the manipulation of data. Example of regular expressions is a dot (.) and question mark (?). A dot is used to match a single character in the data; in data matching the dot (.) takes as an independent character (Xu et al 2016). The question (?) differs with a dot (.) in that in the regular expression is used as a quantifier. It is also used after parenthesis has bee used to group particular data.

References

Srinivasan, A., Komuravelli, R., Jain, N., & Mishra, S. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,305,238. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Wang, H., Han, J., Shao, B., & Li, J. (2019). Regular Expression Matching on billion-nodes Graphs. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1904.11653.

Xu, C., Chen, S., Su, J., Yiu, S. M., & Hui, L. C. (2016). A survey on regular expression matching for deep packet inspection: Applications, algorithms, and hardware platforms. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 18(4), 2991-3029.

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