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 A regular expression is a powerful tool for matching

text, based on a pre-defined pattern. It can detect the
presence or absence of a text by matching with a
particular pattern, and also can split a pattern into one
or more sub-patterns
 Regular expressions use a sequence of characters and
symbols to define a pattern of text.
 Regular expressions are useful for finding phone
numbers, email addresses, dates, and any other data
that has a consistent format

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 Python standard library provides a re module for
regular expressions. Its primary function is to offer a
search, where it takes a regular expression and a
string.

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 A Regular Expression (RegEx) is a sequence of
characters that defines a search pattern. For example,

^a...s$
Any five letter string starting with
a and ending with s

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 Raw string
 The raw string is slightly different from a regular
string, it won’t interpret the \ character as an escape
character.

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 Some characters are metacharacters, also called as
special characters, and don’t match themselves.

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 Metacharacter [ ]
 used for specifying a character class, Characters can be
listed individually, or a range of characters can be
indicated by giving two characters and separating them
by a '-'.

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 ^ symbol in [ ]

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 []

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 . dot

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 ^ Caret

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 $ dollar

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 * star

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 + plus

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 { } Braces

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 { } Braces

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 | Alternation

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 ( ) Group

 Grouping constructs break up a regex in

Python into sub expressions or groups. This
serves two purposes:
◦ Grouping: A group represents a single syntactic
entity. Additional metacharacters apply to the entire
group as a unit.
◦ Capturing: Some grouping constructs also capture
the portion of the search string that matches the
subexpression in the group. You can retrieve
captured matches later through several different
mechanisms.

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 ( ) Group

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 \ slash

 Backlash \ is used to escape various

characters including all metacharacters.
 \$a match if a string contains $ followed
by a. Here, $ is not interpreted by a RegEx
engine in a special way.

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 The following list of special sequences

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 \A - Matches if the specified characters are at the
start of a string.

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 \b - Matches if the specified characters are at the
beginning or end of a word.

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 \B - Opposite of \b. Matches if the specified
characters are not at the beginning or end of a word..

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 \d - Matches any decimal digit. Equivalent to [0-9]

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 \D - Matches any non-decimal digit. Equivalent
to [^0-9]

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 \s - Matches where a string contains any whitespace
character. Equivalent to [ \t\n\r\f\v]

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 \S - Matches where a string contains any non-
whitespace character. Equivalent to [^ \t\n\r\f\v].

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 \w - Matches any alphanumeric character (digits and
alphabets). Equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_].
 underscore _ is also considered an alphanumeric
character.

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 \W - Matches any non-alphanumeric character.
Equivalent to [^a-zA-Z0-9_]

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 \Z - Matches if the specified characters are at
the end of a string.

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 Python has a module named re to work with
regular expressions. To use it, we need to
import the module.

 re.findall()
 The re.findall() method returns a list of strings
containing all matches.

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 re.findall()

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 re.split()
 The re.split method splits the string where there
is a match and returns a list of strings where the
splits have occurred.

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 re.split()

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 re.split()
 You can pass maxsplit argument to
the re.split() method. It's the maximum number
of splits that will occur.

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 re.sub()
 The method returns a string where matched
occurrences are replaced with the content
of replace variable.

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 re.sub()
 The method returns a string where matched
occurrences are replaced with the content
of replace variable.

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 re.sub()
 You can pass count as a fourth parameter to
the re.sub() method. If omited, it results to 0.
This will replace all occurrences.

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 re.subn()
 The re.subn() is similar to re.sub() except it
returns a tuple of 2 items containing the new
string and the number of substitutions made.

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 re.search()
 The re.search() method takes two arguments: a
pattern and a string. The method looks for the
first location where the RegEx pattern produces
a match with the string..
 If the search is successful, re.search() returns a
match object; if not, it returns None

 match = re.search(pattern, str).

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 re.search()
 match = re.search(pattern, str).

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 re.fullmatch()
 Unlike the match() method, which performs the
pattern matching only at the beginning of the
string, the re.fullmatch method returns a match
object if and only if the entire target string from
the first to the last character matches the
regular expression pattern.

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 re.fullmatch()

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 whenever we found a match to the regex
pattern, Python returns us the Match object

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 match.group()
 The group() method returns the part of the
string where there is a match.

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 match.group()

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 match.start(), match.end() and match.span()

 The start() function returns the index of the start

of the matched substring
 end() returns the end index of the matched
substring

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 match.re and match.string
 The re attribute of a matched object returns a
regular expression object.
Similarly, string attribute returns the passed
string.

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 Python regex allows optional flags to specify
when using regular expression patterns
with match(), search(), and split(), among others.

 IGNORECASE flag
◦ which stands for ignoring a case. specified this flag in
the regex method as an argument to perform case
insensitive matching.

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 IGNORECASE flag
◦ re.I
◦ re.IGNORECASE

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 DOTALL flag
◦ By default, the dot(.) metacharacter inside the regular
expression pattern represents any character, be it a
letter, digit, symbol, or a punctuation mark, except the
new line character, which is \n.

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 DOTALL flag
◦ re.S
◦ re.DOTALL

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 VERBOSE flag
◦ That re.X flag stands for verbose. This flag allows more
flexibility and better formatting when writing more
complex regex patterns between the parentheses of
the match(), search(), or other regex methods.

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 VERBOSE flag
◦ re.X
◦ re.VERBOSE

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 MULTILINE flag
◦ The re.M flag is used as an argument inside the regex
method to perform a match inside a multiline block of
text.

 re.M
 re.MULTILINE

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 MULTILINE flag
◦ his flag is used with metacharacter ^ and $.
 The caret (^)matches a pattern only at the
beginning of the string
 The dollar ($) matches the regular expression
pattern at the end of the string

When this flag is specified, the pattern

character ^ matches at the beginning of the string and
each newline’s start (\n). And the metacharacter
character $ match at the end of the string and the end of
each newline (\n).

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 MULTILINE flag

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 ASCII flag

 regex \w, \W, \b, \B, \d, \D, \s and \S perform

ASCII-only matching instead of full Unicode
matching. This is only meaningful for Unicode
patterns and is ignored for byte patterns.

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 ASCII flag
◦ re.A
◦ re.ASCII

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