Note1: Basic Text Processing

Regular Expressions: Disjunctions

Online regular expression test

1. Letters inside square brackets []

Pattern	Matches
[wW]oodchuck	Woodchuck, woodchuck
[1234567890]	Any digit

2. Ranges [ A - Z ]

Pattern	Matches
[A-Z]	An upper case letter	Drenched Blossoms
[a-z]	A lower case letter	my beans were impatient
[0-9]	A single digit	Chapter 1: Down the Rabbit Hole

3. Negations [^Ss]  

    Carat means negation only when first in []

Pattern	Matches
[^A-Z]	Not an upper case letter	Oyfn pripetchik
[^Ss]	Neither ‘S’ nor ‘s’	I have no exquisite reason”
[^e^]	Neither e nor ^	Look here
a^b	The pattern a carat b	Look up a^bnow

4. The pipe | for disjunction

Pattern	Matches
groundhog|woodchuck
yours|mine	yours   mine
a|b|c	= [abc]
[gG]roundhog|[Ww]oodchuck

Regular Expressions: ? * + .

Pattern	Matches
colou?r	Optional previous char	color    colour
oo*h!	0 or more of previous char	oh!ooh!  oooh! ooooh!
o+h!	1 or more of previous char	oh!ooh!  oooh! ooooh!
baa+	baa baaa baaaa  baaaaa
beg.n	begin begun begun beg3n

Anchors: ^ $

^ : start with

$: end with

Pattern	Matches
^[A-Z]	Palo Alto
^[^A-Za-z]	1    “Hello”
\.$	The end.
.$	The end?  The end!

Two kinds of errors:

Type I: matching strings that we should not have matched     False positives

Type II: not matching things that we should have matched     False negatives

Two antagonistic efforts:

Increasing accuracy or precision (minimize false positives)

Increasing coverage or recall (minimizing false negatives)

Word Tokenization