Regex Redux! New & Updated Regexes Available for Blackout
- Jedidiah Cassinelli
- 1 minute ago
- 2 min read
We’ve refreshed our support site with new and improved regular expressions (regexes)
for Blackout, making it easier to find and redact sensitive information with precision.
Regexes in Blackout
For many years now we’ve listed commonly used regexes on our site (the reason we’re here today). And if you’re reading this, you probably know that you can use regexes in projects to help find important info in your Excel, image, and PDF documents (looking at you, PII).
However, perhaps less well known is the ability to use regexes when using Find & Redact (introduced in Blackout 5.0). We know they’re powerful, and they’re guaranteed to save you some time.
Updating and Customizing Regexes
Today’s updates all stem from our interactions with you, the users. As a part of the support you get when you use Blackout, our team is available to write custom regexes for you based on the specific needs of the case and documents you have on your plate. Sometimes this comes in the form of patterns we haven’t encountered before, so we’ll build them from scratch.
And at other times, the need is more of a variation on something we already have on our site, so we work with you to tweak it to meet your needs. Some examples of what you can find on the site now include:
Variations on social security numbers
SSNs that have no dashes between the number groups
Redacting all but the last 4 digits
Variations on email addresses
Redact everything before the @ symbol
Redact everything after the @ symbol
Redacting everything on a line after a particular word, e.g. everything after “From:”
Driver’s license numbers from all 50 states (plus a couple other locations)
Start using them today!
Hopefully you’re already using regexes regularly with Blackout and you can add these to your existing toolbelt. If you’re just getting started with them, the regex resource pages are a great place to start, along with an article and video for making changes on your own.
But if you have any questions or have a custom regex in mind, reach out to support@milyli.com and we’ll get the team on it for you! Oh, and don’t forget that you can customize your Find & Redact preconfigured search terms – something our support team can help you power up as well.
Happy redacting!