Create lessons on regular expressions.

[gvwilson]

Regular expressions are always a popular topic at bootcamps: they're entertaining, very little can go wrong, and they're useful to anyone working with messy textual data. The branch creating-lesson-on-regular-expressions now contains intermediate/regex/ with material imported from the Version 4 lessons; we would like to:

1. turn this into several chunks of Markdown,
2. add diagrams and exercises, and
3. integrate the Javascript library used in http://regexpal.com into our lessons so that people can learn interactively regardless of what language the bootcamp is using.

The topics from the Version 4 lesson are listed below; there's no need for the Version 5 lesson to stick to exactly these topics, or this division of material, but it seems like a reasonable starting point. If you'd like to work on one of these, please add your name(s) in comments on this issue.

• [ ] Simple Patterns
• [ ] Operators
• [ ] Under the Hood
• [ ] More Patterns
• [ ] More Tools

[danmaclean]

I'll do operators!

[ctjacobs]

I'll do 'Simple Patterns'.

[twitwi]

I'll try to embed something like http://regexpal.com/ to support the lesson in a programming language independent manner.

[twitwi]

I could work on it, it is in on a branch of mine: https://github.com/twitwi/bc/tree/regexp-tester-ui/intermediate/regex/tools

It is basically a script that copies the content of a fork of the "regexpal" project. I made the fork for software carpentry: https://github.com/twitwi/regexpal/tree/software-carpentry

Improvements include better styling (dropping the default style) and teaching-oriented features (adding templates and examples).

[gvwilson]

@twitwi can you please merge in anything you have that puts regexpal into our lessons? And assign this to whoever is working on the regular expression stuff?