Regex sounds intimidating. It is not. Once you understand the 5 core concepts, you can extract any pattern from any text in seconds. Here is everything you need to know. What is regex? Regex is a pattern language. You describe what you are looking for using special characters and Python finds it for you — in any block of text, any size. Real example: your client sends you a document with 500 customer records mixed with random text. They need all email addresses extracted into Excel. Without regex this takes hours. With regex it takes 3 lines. import re text = " Contact [email protected] or [email protected] for details " emails = re . findall ( r ' [\w.-]+@[\w.-]+\.\w+ ' , text ) print ( emails ) # ['[email protected]', '[email protected]'] Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The 5 patterns you need to know 1. \d — any digit re . findall ( r ' \d ' , ' abc123def456 ' ) # ['1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6'] Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode 2. \w — any word character (letter, digit, underscore) re .…