Positive look-ahead is a type of lookaround construct in regular expressions that matches a pattern only if it is followed by another pattern, without including the second pattern in the match.
In Python's re module, the syntax for positive look-ahead is (?=pattern), where pattern is the pattern that must follow the match. For example, the regular expression foo(?=bar) would match the string "foo" only if it is followed by the string "bar".
Here's an example:
import retext = "The foo is followed by bar, but not by baz."pattern = r"foo(?=bar)"matches = re.findall(pattern, text)print(matches) |
In this example, the regular expression foo(?=bar) matches the string "foo" only if it is followed by the string "bar". The re.findall() function finds all non-overlapping matches of the pattern in the input string text.
The output of this program is:
['foo'] |
Notice that the regular expression matches only the first occurrence of "foo", because it is followed by "bar".
Positive look-ahead constructs are useful when you want to match a pattern only if it is followed by another pattern, without including that pattern in the match. They can be very powerful tools for building complex regular expressions.