Day 1: Reading the pageviews

In the left side navigation go to Dashboard >> Behaviour >> Pages.

You should see a Pages table. Notice the green control icons BELOW the last row of the table.  If you click the Hierarchical button ⚙️, the table will have expand/collapse sections as seen here:

This is called Hierarchical View. Its opposite is Flat View.

1. Nothing in the table is a page unless you see the line start with this symbol ("Open Page") . All of the other lines will start with a Expand/Collapse symbol. Those are folders/directories/breadcrumbs/fragments. They are atoms of the overall path to the page.
2. This is the last stage of the URL.

Here is how the page for https://matomo.org/faq/general/faq_146/index.html actually looks.

Here are the fragments of the URL, shown within the Matomo Hierarchical view.

But what if you don't want this hierarchical version of the URL? Can we show every page on its own line, and no funny business?

One way is to avoid the URL totally and show the titles instead. In the navigation that is
Dashboard >> Behavior >> Page titles

---

Under the last line of a Matomo Table there are always these green icons.

1. Flatten / Hierarchical / Show Totals (it varies from table to table)
2. Show as a graphic / Show as a Table
3. Export this data as JSON, XML, CSV, TSV.
4. Filter!
   

The magnifying glass (4) is a filter. The filter can handle regex. Which regex does Matomo use? Matomo is written in PHP, so it uses PCRE2
Here are some regular expressions in Matomo:

• cats|dogs MATCHES CATS OR DOGS
• b[aeiou]g MATCHES BAG BOG BUG BEG
• goo[^g] MATCHES GOOD BUT NOT GOOGLE

Here is a free guide to PHP Regular Expressions:
https://www.w3schools.com/php/php_regex.asp

And here is a user in the Matomo Forum, giving an example of the escapes he used to do a URL. The first fails, the second works: