Regular expressions are powerful search tools comprised of a sequence of defining characters. With regex, you can search, validate, replace, and extract strings of text based on these defining characters.
In this tutorial, we will break down a regex used to match an email using the following code snippet:
/^([a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+)@([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+)\.([a-zA-Z]{2,})$/
Going character by character, we will work through this snippet of code to understand how it is defining search parameters. Regular expressions can feel overwhelming at first, but by breaking the code down into different defining groups, we can easily understand how this expression is working.