Regex for the Rest of Us: A Practical Introduction
- Workshop
- Language and Translation Technologies
-
Michael Schroeder
- B&R Industrial Automation GmbH
Contents
If you’ve ever wished for a faster, smarter way to find and clean up text—whether in XML files, CMS exports, translation memories, or documentation drafts—then regular expressions (regex) might be the tool you never knew you needed. This workshop is designed specifically for absolute beginners—no coding background or prior experience required. Aimed at technical communicators and translators who deal with structured (or chaotic!) content, this session introduces regex in a friendly, accessible way. You’ll learn how to recognize patterns, match and manipulate text, and build your very first expressions. Through real-world examples, we’ll show how regex can save time, reduce errors, and solve complex text-handling challenges that would otherwise take hours to fix manually. Once you’ve seen what regex can do, you’ll wonder how you ever worked without it.
Takeaways
- Learn what regular expressions are and how they work.
- Build your first basic expressions.
- Identify possible use cases in tech comm workflows.
- See practical, real-world examples.
- Gain confidence to try it yourself.
Prior knowledge
No experience necessary.