The re module in Python provides support for regular expressions (regex), which are powerful tools for manipulating text. Regular expressions are a sequence of characters that define a search pattern, which can be used to match and manipulate text.
The re module provides several functions and methods for working with regular expressions, including:
re.compile(pattern, flags=0): Compiles a regular expression pattern into a regular expression object. The resulting object can then be used to perform regular expression operations such as matching and searching.
re.match(pattern, string, flags=0): Attempts to match the regular expression pattern to the beginning of the string. Returns a match object if successful, or None if no match is found.
re.search(pattern, string, flags=0): Searches the string for a match to the regular expression pattern. Returns a match object if successful, or None if no match is found.
re.findall(pattern, string, flags=0): Returns a list of all non-overlapping matches of the regular expression pattern in the string.
re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0): Replaces all non-overlapping occurrences of the regular expression pattern in the string with the replacement string repl.
re.split(pattern, string, maxsplit=0, flags=0): Splits the string at all occurrences of the regular expression pattern. Returns a list of substrings.
re.escape(string): Escapes any special characters in the string so that it can be used as a literal string in a regular expression pattern.
re.fullmatch(pattern, string, flags=0): Attempts to match the entire string to the regular expression pattern. Returns a match object if successful, or None if no match is found.
These functions and methods can be used to perform a wide range of regular expression operations, such as finding all occurrences of a particular pattern in a string, replacing parts of a string that match a pattern, and validating that a string matches a particular pattern.
Here is an example of using the re module to search for a pattern in a string:
import restring = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"pattern = r"quick"match = re.search(pattern, string)if match: print("Pattern found at position", match.start())else: print("Pattern not found") |
In this example, we import the re module and define a string and a regular expression pattern. We then use the re.search() function to search the string for the pattern, and print the position of the pattern if it is found. If the pattern is not found, we print a message indicating that.