These days, the important thing is to know the right question. Once you get that far, the rest is easy.

eg, you want to extract a date from a sentence. If you don't know the question, you might google "get date from sentence". If you do, then you'd google "date regular expression".

You still need to know stuff - just not as much of each thing, so you can know more. It's like memorizing the TOC of a book rather than the content of every chapter.