Lesson Contribution - RegEx Metacharacters

[klbarnes20]

I'm a member of The Carpentries Core Team and I'm submitting this issue on behalf of another member of the community. In most cases, I won't be able to follow up or provide more details other than what I'm providing below.

RegEx metacharacters that are covered at the url here https://librarycarpentry.org/lc-data-intro/01-regular-expressions/index.html can be used in OpenRefine to work with messy data covered in the OpenRefine lessons here https://librarycarpentry.org/lc-open-refine/01-introduction/index.html. RegEx metacharacters can be used when working with data presented in a simple tabular format such as a spreadsheet, a comma separated values file (csv) or a tab delimited file (tsv) but with internal inconsistencies either in data formats, or where data appears, or in terminology used. RegEx metacharacters can be used in OpenRefine to standardize and clean data across the file. It would be good to make that connection within the lessons so that learners can bring in prior learning from the RegEx Library Carpentries lessons into the OpenRefine lessons.

[morskyjezek]

This is a good point! There are direct uses of regex in the OpenRefine lesson, as well as in the grep section of the shell lesson. And probably others, too.

[morskyjezek]

Note: the connection is mentioned in the callout on "Regex Syntax" in the current episode 1 page, see https://librarycarpentry.github.io/lc-data-intro/01-regular-expressions.html

Could still be useful to add a clearer mention/explanation and also mention the OpenRefine lesson.