Power BI and Regular Expressions

I read a quote somewhere along the lines of…

If you are trying to solve a problem with regular expressions...
you now have two problems

This seems a little harsh for a useful tool that has been with us for what seems a very long time.  Plenty of languages offer support for RegEx string searching and pattern matching but not so far in Power BI Desktop.

I thought I would share a simple and quick way to enable the use of RegEx in Power BI.

This could be useful in a number of ways.  RegEx patterns could help validate strings from source systems:

• Valid email addresses
• URLs
• IP addresses
• Product Codes
• Stripping numbers or texts from strings

I’m going to look at the first scenario and demonstrate with a simple exercise how you might use RegEx to test if email addresses are valid.

DAX and M don’t have any dedicated…