Appendix D. Regular Expressions

When you use regular expressions (discussed in Chapter 4), you can match literal strings, for example:

>>> "some text".match(/me/)

["me"]

But the true power of regular expressions comes from matching patterns, not literal strings. The following table describes the different syntax you can use in your patterns, and provides some examples of their use.

Pattern

Description

[abc]

Matches a class of characters.

>>> "some text".match(/[otx]/g)

["o", "t", "x", "t"]

[a-z]

A class of characters defined as a range. For example [a-d] is the same as [abcd], [a-z] matches all lowercase characters, [a-zA-Z0-9_] matches all characters, numbers and the underscore character.

>>> "Some Text".match(/[a-z]/g)

["o", ...

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