Re
The re module is Python’s standard-library module for compiling and applying regular expressions to text.
Tiny Python Projects: Learn coding and testing with puzzles and games
re is Python's standard-library module for matching and manipulating text with regular expressions.
- How it is used
- Uses regular-expression patterns to match, substitute, and split text when direct string methods become cumbersome.
- How deep it goes
- Introduces character classes, repetition, matching position, substitution, and splitting, but deliberately scratches only the surface of regexes.
- Examples
- Demonstrates vowel replacement, initial-consonant matching, and comma-based splitting.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via Python’s re module to replace matched text, detect patterns at chosen positions, and split text with regex delimiters.
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The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition
re is Python's standard-library module for matching and processing text with regular expressions.
- How it is used
- Handles flexible text searching, pattern extraction, replacement, splitting, and recognition beyond literal substring operations.
- How deep it goes
- Explains patterns, compilation, search results, raw strings, replacements, flags, and match processing without detailing every special character.
- Examples
- Uses whitespace normalization and line counting for text containing the word hello.
- What you can do after
- Apply re.compile, search, and sub to detect patterns, inspect matches, count matching lines, and normalize text.
Read how The Quick Python Book, Fourth Edition explains re →
Related concepts
- regular expressionuses · A formal pattern notation that describes sets of strings and enables text to be matched, searched, extracted, or transformed.
- standard librarypart of · A standard library is a collection of reusable modules, types, functions, APIs, and other facilities distributed with a programming language implementation or platform.
- Pythonused by · Python is a high-level, general-purpose, dynamically typed programming language known for readable syntax and automatic memory management.
- ChatGPTused by · ChatGPT is OpenAI’s conversational AI service, which lets users interact with generative AI models and related tools through natural-language prompts.
- re.compilehas part · re.compile is a Python standard-library function that compiles a regular-expression pattern into a reusable pattern object.
- splithas part · Split is an operation or function that divides a string or sequence into parts according to a separator, pattern, or other rule.
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