Summary

In this chapter, you've learned how to implement regular expressions in Python. In addition, you've learned a process for identifying  patterns and building appropriate pattern strings to recognizing particular patterns. To summarize, the first step to approaching a pattern recognition problem is to observe the data and Identify a pattern that can be represented with a regular expression. Once a pattern has been identified, the next step is to build a pattern string to capture the data and verify that the pattern string works well and as expected. Finally, the regular expression should be implemented expression to either clean, extract or filter text data.

This concludes the initial section of the book dealing with a generalized programming approach to data wrangling. In the next two chapters, I will take on a more formulated approach to data wrangling.

In the next chapter, Chapter 6, Cleaning Numerical Data - An Introduction to R and RStudio, I will introduce the R programming language...