In this video tutorial, we walk through key building blocks of regular expressions using the incredibly powerful REGEXEXTRACT function in Google Sheets. To follow along, make a copy of this Sheet. Topics covered:
- Matching characters and sets of characters
- Using ORs to match multiple things
- Using escapes to match special characters
- Matching the beginning and end of strings (input text)
- Extracting substrings with capture groups
- Bonus: the handy Sheets IFERROR function
A little bit of regex knowledge can go a long way. Regular expressions are supported in all major programming languages, and they are also available as a text/field matching option in many Google products including Analytics, Data Studio, and Tag Manager. For example:
- Google Analytics
- View filters
- Goals – matching pages or event attributes
- Content groupings
- Customizing channel groupings
- Matching dimensions in custom segments
- Data Studio
- Filters
- Custom fields
- Tag Manager
- Triggers
- Custom variables
A few resources mentioned in the video:
- Regexr – web-based regex testing tool
- RegexOne – step-by-step regular expression tutorials
- SEMrush – the source of the sample data in the Sheet, and a fabulous toolset for SEO
And here’s a post I wrote a while back about searching-and-replacing in Sheets with regular expressions.
