I rely heavily on regular expressions when processing old data. Like my post about cleaning phone numbers, I’ll demonstrate another example of how useful regex can be when dealing with unruly data.

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I like to keep my TV rips well-organized, and labeled with the correct episode title. I’ve been using the excellent Bulk Rename Utility to quickly rename with proper series title, season and episode numbers—but the individual episode titles were always a pain. Begrudgingly, I’d just copy-paste the titles from Wikipedia, always wanting a way to automate that process.

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I’ve been in the position of having to take an unnormalized database that had virtually no data validation or standardization in place, and migrating it to a completely different, normalized schema. I wielded the power of regular expressions (regex) to help me through the process.

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