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๐ŸฆSwift Lessons
Lesson 32 / 68

Intro to Regular Expressions (Pattern Matching)

In this lesson you will learn the basics of pattern matching with regular expressions in Swift so you can check whether text follows a given format. This is for anyone searching for "Swift regular expressions how to use".

A regular expression is a special notation that describes the shape of a string. You can specify a pattern such as "three digits, a hyphen, then four digits", check whether text matches it, and pull out the matching part. Swift uses .range(of:options: .regularExpression).

The sample code extracts something that looks like a phone number with text.range(of: ..., options: .regularExpression), and uses the same form to test whether "12345" is all digits.

A common stumbling block for beginners is learning what all the symbols mean. It looks like nothing but punctuation at first, but it is a powerful tool that pays off in practice, for example when validating email formats.

In real-world development, learning regular expressions once gives you a skill that transfers to most other programming languages.

๐Ÿ“– Reference code
โœ๏ธ Your code
Type your code, then press "Run"

๐Ÿงช This site can't compile or run Swift directly, so it checks on the spot whether what you typed matches the reference code (scoring happens entirely in your browser โ€” nothing is sent anywhere).

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