Accolade supports a feature called “Regex Matching” which we described at a high-level in a recent blog post. This feature utilizes a utility known as “regular expressions”; but what exactly are these?

At its most basic level, regular expressions or “regex” is about text manipulation to achieve some goal such as searching for a specific character pattern and replacing that pattern with a new one (i.e. find and replace) or perhaps extracting the matched data to a file. For example, using a scripting language such as Perl–that contains a regex engine–a simple program could be written to extract email addresses from some volume of text. An expression would be written to search for the “@” symbol and capture all data before or after it until some whitespace (fancy term for a space) is found. One could get more sophisticated and make sure that the text after the “@” contained a “.” to avoid extracting false positives. 

Just like the Perl programming language, the Accolade Regex Match feature provides a regex engine which customers can program to perform pattern matching on large volumes of data as they come into a security appliance or other similar node. Customers might use this, for example, to replace all personally identifiable information (PII) such as social security or credit card numbers with “X”s so that data doesn’t leak out and compromise the security of customers or partners. 

The uses for Regex Matching are almost limitless, and to learn more about how this feature can help your business, please contact us at [email protected].