Discover Regular Expressions (and the new Excel functions)

Hi everyone,

After the availability of regex (= regular expressions) in VBA already before 2003, after Google Sheets which has had its REGEX functions since at least 2015... Microsoft FINALLY released its REGEX functions last year (in 2024)... It was about time

For those who would like to learn more about regex, but are afraid to see things like this...

=REGEXREPLACE(A2,"([0-3]?\d)\W([0-1]?\d)\W(20\d{2})","$3/$2/$1")

...I have created a long tutorial to help you better understand them, starting from scratch (but be careful, because once you really know how to use them, you might end up loving it because it’s so powerful ).

The tutorial (3 pages) starts on the page of the REGEXTEST function.

There are also 2 other pages for the functions REGEXREPLACE and REGEXEXTRACT.

FOR GOOGLE SHEETS USERS

There are also 3 similar REGEX functions (and REGEXMATCH also has its own tutorial to start from scratch):
https://sheets-pratique.com/en/functions

Note that the functions in Google Sheets are not completely identical to those in Excel and that the regex engines are different (PCRE2 for Excel and RE2 for Sheets).