Regular Expressions

Last updated on 2023-07-03 | Edit this page

Expand All Solutions

OVERVIEW
Questions

 How can you imagine using regular expressions in your work?

Objectives

 Identify potential use cases for regular expressions

 Recognize common regex metacharacters

 Use regular expressions in searches

Regular expressions
Regular expressions are a concept and an implementation used in many different programming
environments for sophisticated pattern matching. They are an incredibly powerful tool that can
amplify your capacity to find, manage, and transform data and files.

A regular expression, often abbreviated to regex, is a method of using a sequence of characters to

define a search to match strings, i.e. “find and replace”-like operations. In computation, a ‘string’
is a contiguous sequence of symbols or values. For example, a word, a date, a set of numbers
(e.g., a phone number), or an alphanumeric value (e.g., an identifier). A string could be any
length, ranging from empty (zero characters) to one that spans many lines of text (including line
break characters). The terms ‘string’ and ‘line’ are sometimes used interchangeably, even when
they are not strictly the same thing.
In library searches, we are most familiar with a small part of regular expressions known as the
“wild card character,” but there are many more features to the complete regular expressions
syntax. Regular expressions will let you:

 Match on types of characters (e.g. ‘upper case letters’, ‘digits’, ‘spaces’, etc.).
 Match patterns that repeat any number of times.
 Capture the parts of the original string that match your pattern.

Regex can also be useful for daily work. For example, say your organization wants to change the
way they display telephone numbers on their website by removing the parentheses around the
area code. Rather than search for each specific phone number (that could take forever and be
prone to error) or searching for every open parenthesis character (could also take forever and
return many false-positives), you could search for the pattern of a phone number. Regular
expressions rely on the use of literal characters and metacharacters. A metacharacter is any
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character that has a special
meaning. By using metacharacters and possibly literal characters, you can construct a regex for
finding strings or files that match a pattern rather than a specific string.

Since regular expressions defines some ASCII characters as “metacharacters” that have more
than their literal meaning, it is also important to be able to “escape” these metacharacters to use
them for their normal, literal meaning. For example, the period . means “match any character”,
but if you want to match a period then you will need to use a \ in front of it to signal to the
regular expression processor that you want to use the period as a plain old period and not a
metacharacter. That notation is called “escaping” the special character. The concept of
“escaping” special characters is shared across a variety of computational settings, including
markdown and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

REGEX SYNTAX AND INTEROPERABILITY

Most regular expression implementations employ similar syntaxes and metacharacters (generally
influenced by the regex syntax of a programming language called Perl), and they behave
similarly for most pattern-matching in this lesson. But there are differences, often subtle, in each,
so it’s always a good practice to read the application or language’s documentation whenever
available, especially when you start using more advanced regex features. Some programs,
notably many UNIX command line programs (for more on UNIX see our ‘Shell Lesson’), use an
older regex standard (called ‘POSIX regular expressions’) which is less feature-rich and uses
different metacharacters than Perl-influenced implementations. For the purposes of our lesson,
you do not need to worry too much about all this, but if you want to follow up on this see this
detailed syntax comparison.

A very simple use of a regular expression would be to locate the same word spelled two different
ways. For example the regular expression organi[sz]e matches
both organise and organize. But because it locates all matches for the pattern in the file, not
just for that word, it would also
match reorganise, reorganize, organises, organizes, organised, organized, etc.
Learning common regex metacharacters

Square brackets can be used to define a list or range of characters to be found. So:

 [ABC] matches A or B or C.
 [A-Z] matches any upper case letter.
 [A-Za-z] matches any upper or lower case letter.
 [A-Za-z0-9] matches any upper or lower case letter or any digit.

Then there are:

 . matches any character.

 \d matches any single digit.
 \w matches any part of word character (equivalent to [A-Za-z0-9]).
 \s matches any space, tab, or newline.
 \ used to escape the following character when that character is a special character. So, for
example, a regular expression that found .com would be \.com because . is a special
character that matches any character.
 ^ is an “anchor” which asserts the position at the start of the line. So what you put after
the caret will only match if they are the first characters of a line. The caret is also known
as a circumflex.
 $ is an “anchor” which asserts the position at the end of the line. So what you put before
it will only match if they are the last characters of a line.
 \b asserts that the pattern must match at a word boundary. Putting this either side of a
word stops the regular expression matching longer variants of words. So:
o the regular expression mark will match not only mark but also
find marking, market, unremarkable, and so on.
o the regular expression \bword will match word, wordless, and wordlessly.
o the regular expression comb\b will match comb and honeycomb but not combine.
o the regular expression \brespect\b will match respect but
not respectable or disrespectful.

So, what is ^[Oo]rgani.e\b going to match?

USING SPECIAL CHARAC TERS IN REGULAR EXPR ESSION

MATCHES

What will the regular expression ^[Oo]rgani.e\b match?

Show me the solution

Other useful special characters are:

 * matches the preceding element zero or more times. For example, ab*c matches “ac”,
“abc”, “abbbc”, etc.
  + matches the preceding element one or more times. For example, ab+c matches “abc”,
“abbbc” but not “ac”.
 ? matches when the preceding character appears zero or one time.
 {VALUE} matches the preceding character the number of times defined by VALUE;
ranges, say, 1-6, can be specified with the syntax {VALUE,VALUE}, e.g. \d{1,9} will
match any number between one and nine digits in length.
 | means or.
 /i renders an expression case-insensitive (equivalent to [A-Za-z]).

So, what are these going to match?

1
RGANI.E\W*

What will the regular expression ^[Oo]rgani.e\w* match?

Show me the solution

[ O o ] r g a n i . e\ w + $

What will the regular expression [Oo]rgani.e\w+$ match?

Show me the solution

^ [ O o ] r g a n i . e\w ? \ b

What will the regular expression ^[Oo]rgani.e\w?\b match?

Show me the solution

^ [ O o ] r g a n i . e\w ? $

What will the regular expression ^[Oo]rgani.e\w?$ match?

Show me the solution

\ b [ O o ] r g a n i . e\ w { 2 } \ b

What will the regular expression \b[Oo]rgani.e\w{2}\b match?

Show me the solution

\ b [ O o ] r g a n i . e\ b | \ b [ O o ]rgani.e \ w{1} \b

What will the regular expression \b[Oo]rgani.e\b|\b[Oo]rgani.e\w{1}\b match?

Show me the solution

This logic is useful when you have lots of files in a directory, when those files have logical file
names, and when you want to isolate a selection of files. It can be used for looking at cells in
spreadsheets for certain values, or for extracting some data from a column of a spreadsheet to
make new columns. There are many other contexts in which regex is useful when using a
computer to search through a document, spreadsheet, or file structure. Some real-world use cases
for regex are included on a ACRL Tech Connect blog post .

To embed this knowledge we will not - however - be using computers. Instead we’ll use pen and
paper for now.

Exercise

Work in teams of four to six on the exercises below. When you think you have the right answer,
check it against the solution.

When you finish, split your team into two groups and write each other some tests. These should
include a) strings you want the other team to write regex for and b) regular expressions you want
the other team to work out what they would match.

Then test each other on the answers. If you want to check your logic
use regex101, myregexp, regex pal or regexper.com: the first three help you see what text your
regular expression will match, the latter visualises the workflow of a regular expression.

USING SQUARE BRACKET S

What will the regular expression Fr[ea]nc[eh] match?

Show me the solution

French
France
Frence
Franch
Note that the way this regular expression is constructed, it will match misspellings such
as Franch and Frence. Lacking an “anchor” such as ^ or \b, this will also find strings where
there are characters to either side of the regular expression, such as in
French, France's, French-fried.

USING DOLLAR SIGNS

What will the regular expression Fr[ea]nc[eh]$ match?

Show me the solution

French
France
Frence
Franch
This will match the pattern only when it appears at the end of a line. It will also find strings with
other characters coming before the pattern, for example, in French or faux-French.

INTRODUCING OPTIONS

What would match the strings French and France that appear at the beginning of a line?

Show me the solution

^France|^French
This will also find words where there were characters after French such as Frenchness.

CASE INSENSITIVITY

How do you match the whole words colour and color (case insensitive)?

Solutions
\b[Cc]olou?r\b|\bCOLOU?R\b
/colou?r/i
In real life, you should only come across the case insensitive
variations colour, color, Colour, Color, COLOUR, and COLOR (rather than, say, coLour). So
based on what we know, the logical regular expression is \b[Cc]olou?r\b|\bCOLOU?R\b.

An alternative more elegant option we’ve not discussed is to take advantage of the / delimiters
and add an ‘ignore case’ flag. To use these flags, include / delimiters before and after the
expression then letters after to raise each flag (where i is ‘ignore case’): so /colou?r/i will
match all case insensitive variants of colour and color.

WORD BOUNDARIES

How would you find the whole word headrest and or head rest but not head rest (that is,
with two spaces between head and rest?

Show me the solution

\bhead ?rest\b
Note that although \bhead\s?rest\b does work, it will also match zero or one tabs or newline
characters between head and rest. So again, although in most real world cases it will be fine, it
isn’t strictly correct.

MATCHING NON-LINGUISTIC PATTERNS

How would you find a string that ends with four letters preceded by at least one zero?

Show me the solution

0+[A-Za-z]{4}\b
MATCHING DIGITS

How do you match any four-digit string anywhere?

Show me the solution

\d{4}
Note: this will also match four-digit strings within longer strings of numbers and letters.

MATCHING DATES

How would you match the date format dd-MM-yyyy?

Show me the solution

\b\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}\b
Depending on your data, you may choose to remove the word bounding.

MATCHING MULTIPLE DA TE FORMATS

How would you match the date format dd-MM-yyyy or dd-MM-yy at the end of a line only?

Show me the solution

\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{2,4}$
Note this will also find strings such as 31-01-198 at the end of a line, so you may wish to check
your data and revise the expression to exclude false positives. Depending on your data, you may
choose to add word bounding at the start of the expression.

MATCHING PUBLICATION FORMAT S

How would you match publication formats such as British Library : London,
2015 and Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1999?

Show me the solution

.* ?: .*, \d{4}
Without word boundaries you will find that this matches any text you put
before British or Manchester. Nevertheless, the regular expression does a good job on the
first look up and may be need to be refined on a second, depending on your data.

KEYPOINTS

 Regular expressions are a language for pattern matching.

1. Oo↩︎
Matching & Extracting Strings
Last updated on 2023-05-03 | Edit this page

Expand All Solutions

OVERVIEW
Questions

 How can you use regular expressions to match and extract strings? Objectives

 Use regular expressions to match words, email addresses, and phone numbers.

 Use regular expressions to extract substrings from strings (e.g. addresses).

Exercise Using Regex101.com
For this exercise, open a browser and go to https://regex101.com. Regex101.com is a free regular
expression debugger with real time explanation, error detection, and highlighting.

Open the swcCoC.md file, copy the text, and paste that into the test string box.

For a quick test to see if it is working, type the string community into the regular expression box.

If you look in the box on the right of the screen, you see that the expression matches six
instances of the string ‘community’ (the instances are also highlighted within the text).

TAKING SPACES INTO C ONSIDERATION

Type community. You get three matches. Why not six?

Show me the solution

The string ‘community-led’ matches the first search, but drops out of this result because the
space does not match the character -.

TAKING ANY CHARACTER INTO CONSIDERATION

If you want to match ‘community-led’ by adding other regex characters to the

expression community, what would they be?

Show me the solution

For instance, \S+\b. This would match one or more non-space characters followed by a word
boundary.

EXPLORING EFFECT OF EXPRESSIONS MATCHING DIFFERENT

WORDS

Change the expression to communi and you get 15 full matches of several words. Why?

Show me the solution

Because the string ‘communi’ is present in all of those words, including communication
and community. Because the expression does not have a word boundary, this expression would
also match incommunicado, were it present in this text. If you want to test this,
type incommunicado into the text somewhere and see if it is found.

TAKING CAPITALIZATIO N INTO CONSIDERATION

Type the expression [Cc]ommuni. You get 16 matches. Why?

Show me the solution

The word Community is present in the text with a capital C and with a lowercase c 16 times.

REGEX CHARACTERS THA T INDICATE LOCATION

Type the expression ^[Cc]ommuni. You get no matches. Why?

Show me the solution

There is no matching string present at the start of a line. Look at the text and replace the string
after the ^ with something that matches a word at the start of a line. Does it find a match?

FINDING PLURALS

Find all of the words starting with Comm or comm that are plural.

Show me the solution

[Cc]omm\w+s\b
[Cc] finds capital and lowercase c

omm is straightforward character matches

\w+ matches the preceding element (a word character) one or more times

s is a straightforward character match

\b ensures the ‘s’ is located at the end of the word.

Exercise finding email addresses using

regex101.com
For this exercise, open a browser and go to https://regex101.com.

Open the swcCoC.md file, copy it, and paste it into the test string box.

START WITH WHAT YOU KNOW

What character do you know is held in common with all email addresses?

Show me the solution

The ‘@’ character.

ADD TO WHAT YOU KNOW

The string before the “@” could contain any kind of word character, special character or digit in
any combination and length. How would you express this in regex? Hint: often addresses will
have a dash (-) or dot (.) in them, and neither of these are included in the word character
expression (\w). How do you capture this in the expression?

Show me the solution

[\w.-]+@
\w matches any word character (including digits and underscore)

. matches a literal period (when used in between square brackets, . does not mean “any
character”, it literally means “.”)

- matches a dash

[] the brackets enclose the boolean string that ‘OR’ the word characters, dot, and dash.

+ matches any word character OR digit OR character OR - repeated 1 or more times

FINISH THE EXPRESSIO N

The string after the “@” could contain any kind of word character, special character or digit in
any combination and length as well as the dash. In addition, we know that it will have some
characters after a period (.). Most common domain names have two or three characters, but
many more are now possible. Find the latest list here. What expression would capture this? Hint:
the . is also a metacharacter, so you will have to use the escape \ to express a literal period.
Note: for the string after the period, we did not try to match a - character, since those rarely
appear in the characters after the period at the end of an email address.

Show me the solution

[\w.-]+\.\w{2,3} OR [\w.-]+\.\w+
See the previous exercise for the explanation of the expression up to the +

\. matches the literal period (‘.’) not the regex expression .

\w matches any word (including digits and underscore)

+ matches any word character OR digit OR character OR - repeated 1 or more times.

{2,3} limits the number of word characters and/or digits to a two or three-character string.

[] the brackets enclose the boolean string that ‘OR’ the digits, word characters, characters and
dash.

+ matches any word character OR digit OR character OR - repeated 1 or more times

Exercise finding phone numbers, Using

regex101.com
Does this Code of Conduct contain a phone number?

What to consider:

1. It may or may not have a country code, perhaps starting with a “+”.
2. It will have an area code, potentially enclosed in parentheses.
3. It may have the sections all separated with a “-”.

START WITH WHAT YOU KNOW: FIND STRINGS O F DIGITS

Start with what we know, which is the most basic format of a phone number: three digits, a dash,
and four digits. How would we write a regex expression that matches this?

Show me the solution

\d{3}-\d{4}
\d matches digits

{3} matches 3 digits

- matches the character ‘-’

\d matches any digit

{4} matches 4 digits.

This expression should find three matches in the document.

MATCH A STRING THAT INCLUDES AN AREA COD E WITH A
DASH

Start with what we know, which is the most basic format of a phone number: three digits, a dash,
and four digits. How would we expand the expression to include an area code (three digits and a
dash)?

Show me the solution

\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}
\d matches digits

{3} matches 3 digits

- matches the character ‘-’

\d matches any digit

{4} matches 4 digits.

This expression should find one match in the document

MATCH A STRING THAT INCLUDES AN AREA COD E WITHIN

PARENTHESIS SEPARATE D FROM THE REST OF T HE PHONE
NUMBER WITH A SPACE OR WITHOUT A SPACE

Start with what we know, which is the most basic format of a phone number: three digits, a dash,
and four digits. How would we expand the expression to include a phone number with an area
code in parenthesis, separated from the phone number, with or without a space.

Show me the solution

\(\d{3}\) ?\d{3}-\d{4}
\( escape character with the parenthesis as straightforward character match

\d matches digits

{3} matches 3 digits

\) escape character with the parenthesis as a straightforward character match

? matches zero or one spaces

See the previous exercise for the explanation of the rest of the expression.

This expression should find two matches in the document.

MATCH A PHONE NUMBER CONTAINING A COUNTRY CODE.

Country codes are preceded by a “+” and can have up to three digits. We also have to consider
that there may or may not be a space between the country code and anything appearing next.

Show me the solution

\+\d{1,3} ?\(\d{3}\)\s?\d{3}-\d{4}
\+ escape character with the plus sign as straightforward character match

\d matches digits

{1,3} matches 1 to 3 digits

? matches zero or one spaces

See the previous exercise for the explanation of the rest of the expression.

This expression should find one match in the document.

USING REGULAR EXPRES SIONS WHEN WORKING W ITH FILES

AND DIRECTORIES

One of the reasons we stress the value of consistent and predictable directory and filenaming
conventions is that working in this way enables you to use the computer to select files based on
the characteristics of their file names. For example, if you have a bunch of files where the first
four digits are the year and you only want to do something with files from ‘2017’, then you can.
Or if you have ‘journal’ somewhere in a filename when you have data about journals, you can
use the computer to select just those files. Equally, using plain text formats means that you can
go further and select files or elements of files based on characteristics of the data within those
files. See Workshop Overview: File Naming & Formatting for further background.

Extracting a substring in Google Sheets

using regex
EXTRACTING A SUBSTRI NG IN GOOGLE SHEETS USING REGEX
 1. Export and unzip the 2017 Public Library Survey (originally from the IMLS data
site) as a CSV file.

2. Upload the CSV file to Google Sheets and open as a Google Sheet if it does not do
this by default.

3. Look in the ADDRESS column and notice that the values contain the latitude and
longitude in parenthesis after the library address.

4. Construct a regular expression to match and extract the latitude and longitude into
a new column named ‘latlong’. HINT: Look up the function REGEXEXTRACT in
Google Sheets. That function expects the first argument to be a string (a cell
in ADDRESS column) and a quoted regular expression in the second.
Show me the solution
This is one way to solve this challenge. You might have found others. Inside the cell you can use
the below to extract the latitude and longitude into a single cell. You can then copy the formula
down to the end of the column.

=REGEXEXTRACT(G2,"-?\d+\.\d+, -?\d+\.\d+")
Latitude and longitude are in decimal degree format and can be positive or negative, so we start
with an optional dash for negative values then use \d+ for a one or more digit match followed by
a period \.. Note we had to escape the period using \. After the period we look for one or more
digits \d+ again followed by a literal comma ,. We then have a literal space match followed by
an optional dash - (there are few 0.0 latitude/longitudes that are probably errors, but we’d want
to retain so we can deal with them). We then repeat our \d+\.\d+ we used for the latitude
match.

KEYPOINTS

 Regular expressions are useful for searching and cleaning data.

 Test regular expressions interactively with regex101.com or RegExr.com, and

visualise them with regexper.com.

 Test yourself with RegexCrossword.com or via the quiz and exercises in this
lesson.
Multiple Choice Quiz
Last updated on 2023-05-03 | Edit this page

Expand All Solutions

OVERVIEW
Questions

 How do you find and match strings with regular expressions?

Objectives

 Test knowledge of use of regular expressions.

Multiple Choice Quiz

This multiple choice quiz is designed to embed the regex knowledge you learned during this
module. We recommend you work through it sometime after class (within a week or so).

Q1. WHAT IS THE SPECIAL CHARACTER THAT MATCHES ZERO

OR MORE CHARACTERS?

A. ^

B. #

C. *
Answer
C

Q2. WHICH OF THE FOL LOWING MATCHES ANY S PACE, TAB,

OR NEWLINE?

A. \s

B. \b

C. $
Answer
A

Q3. HOW DO YOU MATCH THE STRING Confident APPEARING

AT THE BEGINNING OF A LINE?

A. $Confident

B. ^Confident

C. #Confident
Answer
B

Q4. HOW DO YOU MATCH THE

WORD C o n f i d e nt i a l APPEARING AT THE BEG INNING OF A
LINE?


 A. ^Confidential\d

B. ^Confidential\b

C. ^Confidential\w
Answer
B

Q5. WHAT DOES THE RE GULAR EXPRESSION [a -z] MATCH?

A. The characters a and z only

B. All characters between the ranges a to z and A to Z

C. All characters between the range a to z

Answer
C

Q6. WHICH OF THESE W ILL MATCH THE

STRINGS revolution , r e volutionary , AND revolutionaries ?

A. revolution[a-z]?

B. revolution[a-z]*

C. revolution[a-z]+
Answer
B

Q7. WHICH OF THESE W ILL MATCH THE

STRINGS revolution , R e volution , AND THEIR PLURAL
VARIANTS ONLY?

A. [rR]evolution[s]+

B. revolution[s]?

C. [rR]evolution[s]?
Answer
C

Q8. WHAT REGULAR EXP RESSION MATCHES THE

STRINGS d o g OR c a t ?

A. dog|cat

B. dog,cat

C. dog | cat
Answer
A

Q9. WHAT REGULAR EXPRESSION MATCHES T HE WHOLE

WORDS d o g OR c a t ?


 A. \bdog|cat\b

B. \bdog\b | \bcat\b

C. \bdog\b|\bcat\b
Answer
C

Q10. WHAT DO WE PUT AFTER A CHARACTER TO MATCH

STRINGS WHERE THAT C HARACTER APPEARS TWO TO FOUR
TIMES IN SEQUENCE?

A. {2,4}

B. {2-4}

C. [2,4]
Answer
A

Q11. THE REGULAR EXPRESSI ON \ d{4} WILL MATCH WHAT?

A. Any four character sequence?

B. Any four digit sequence?


 C. The letterdfour times?
Answer
B

Q12. IF BRACKETS ARE USED TO DEFINE A GRO UP, WHAT

WOULD MATCH THE REGU LAR EXPRESSION (, \s[0 -
9 ] { 1 , 4 } ) { 4 } ,\s [ 0 - 9 ] { 1 ,3} \.[0 - 9] ?

A. , 135, 1155, 915, 513, 18.8

B. , 135, 11557, 915, 513, 18.8

C. , 135, 1155, 915, 513, 188

Answer
A

KEYPOINTS

 Regular expressions answers

Exercises
Last updated on 2023-05-03 | Edit this page
Expand All Solutions
OVERVIEW
Questions

 How do you find and match strings with regular expressions?

Objectives

 Test knowledge of use of regular expressions

Exercises
The exercises are designed to embed the regex knowledge you learned during this module. We
recommend you work through it sometime after class (within a week or so).

WHAT DOES F r [ e a ] n c [ e h] MATCH?

Answer
This matches France, French, in addition to the misspellings Frence, and Franch. It would
also find strings where there were characters to either side of the pattern such as France's, in
French, or French-fried.

WHAT DOES F r [ e a ] n c [ e h]$ MATCH?

Answer
This matches France, French, Frence, and Franch only at the end of a line. It would also
match strings with other characters appearing before the pattern, such as in French or Sino-
French.

WHAT WOULD MATCH THE STRINGS French AND France ONLY

THAT APPEAR AT THE B EGINNING OF A LINE?
Answer
^France|^French This would also find strings with other characters coming after French, such
as Frenchness or France's economy.
HOW DO YOU MATCH THE WHOLE
WORDS c o l o u r AND c o l or (CASE INSENSITIVE)?
Answer
In real life, you should only come across the case insensitive
variations colour, color, Colour, Color, COLOUR, and COLOR (rather than, say, coLour. So
one option would be \b[Cc]olou?r\b|\bCOLOU?R\b. This can, however, get quickly quite
complex. An option we’ve not discussed is to take advantage of the / delimiters and add an
ignore case flag: so /colou?r/i will match all case insensitive variants of colour and color.

HOW WOULD YOU FIND T HE WHOLE-WORD headrest OR head

r e s t BUT NOT head r e st (THAT IS, WITH TWO S PACES
BETWEEN h e a d AND r e s t ?
Answer
\bhead ?rest\b. Note that although \bhead\s?rest\b does work, it would also match zero
or one tabs or newline characters between head and rest. In most real world cases it should,
however, be fine.

HOW WOULD YOU FIND A 4-LETTER WORD THAT END S A

STRING AND IS PRECED ED BY AT LEAST ONE Z ERO?
Answer
0+[a-z]{4}\b

HOW DO YOU MATCH ANY 4-DIGIT STRING ANYWHER E?

Answer
\d{4}. Note this will match 4 digit strings only but will find them within longer strings of
numbers.

HOW WOULD YOU MATCH THE DATE FORMAT dd - MM - yyyy ?

Answer
\b\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{4}\b In most real world situations, you are likely to want word bounding
here (but it may depend on your data).

HOW WOULD YOU MATCH THE DATE FORMAT dd - MM -

y y y y OR d d- M M - y y AT THE END OF A LINE ONLY?
Answer
\d{2}-\d{2}-\d{2,4}$

HOW WOULD YOU MATCH PUBLICATION FOR MATS SUCH

AS Br i t i s h L i br a r y : L ondon, 2015 AND Manchester
U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s : M a n c hester, 1999 ?
Answer
.* : .*, \d{4} You will find that this matches any text you put
before British or Manchester. In this case, this regular expression does a good job on the first
look up and may be need to be refined on a second depending on your real world application.

KEYPOINTS

 Regular expressions answers