Extract text between HTML tags. Pad zip codes with leading 0s. Split a name into First and Last name fields. Pull only responses from a certain person from a transcript. These are all examples of character manipulation, something that is often done when cleaning data. In this workshop we’ll introduce a variety of helpful R functions and packages for working with character data. We’ll also introduce regular expressions, a special language for defining text patterns. At the end of this workshop you’ll have a powerful arsenal of tools for manipulating character strings in R. Previous experience with R will be helpful but not required.