Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Regex (FREE TOOL)

I have two questions for you:

Have you ever tried to use Regex?

Do you know what regex is? (Regular Expressions, used mainly to locate or validate specific strings or patterns of text in a sentence, document, or any other character input.)

If you know what regex is, then you hate it... I asked a group of developers, all professionals, all had years of experience... "have you used regex?" and there were hands, but also groans, and moans. and I swear someone made the fake puking noise.

I actually love regex and still seldom use it because it's just so stressful. You can love something and still find it incredibly annoying, convoluted and... stlll in the end quite magical.

At times it feels like magic.

Turn a seemingly random assortment of characters into a pattern matching machine.

Turn seriously odd series of characters into a data validation formula.

Recently I've been thinking a lot about REGEXMATCH()​

While Google Sheets literally has "Data Validation" as a feature, most of the time we're using dropdowns, human powered dropdowns to categorize and match text in columns.

But REGEXMATCH() can do a TON of great data validation, if you know how to use Regular Expressions.

What if you wanted to use REGEXMATCH() but didn't know how to use REGEX... then I built a tool just for you.

Actually, I built this tool for myself. But you can use it free, right now.

I built a RegexMatch Maker I called the "RegexMatcher"

→ https://bettersheets.co/regexmatcher​

Enter your use case, the text you're trying to match, the pattern you're trying to recognize... and the cell you're doing it in.

The output will literally be the REGEXMATCH() formula written for you. And copied to your clipboard.

Done and done.

I'm working on a list of 200 REGEXMATCH use cases.

Here's a small portion of them:

✉️ Email Validation: Check if a cell contains a valid email address.

📞 Phone Number Validation: Verify if a cell contains a valid phone number.

👨‍💻 URL Detection: Identify if a cell contains a valid URL.

🤐 Zip Code Check: Determine if a cell contains a valid zip code.

🗓️ Date Format Recognition: Check if a cell contains a valid date in a specific format.

🏧 Credit Card Number Validation: Verify if a cell contains a valid credit card number.

👩‍💻 IP Address Detection: Identify if a cell contains a valid IP address.

🏢 Social Security Number (SSN) Validation: Check if a cell contains a valid SSN.

📲 Hashtag Identification: Identify if a cell contains a hashtag (#).

​

Use RegexMatcher today, and let me know how it goes. I'm still improving it as we speak.

-Andrew

Your Resident Google Sheets Wizard at BetterSheets.co​

​