Practical Data Wrangling

Putting patterns together

More sophisticated patterns can be produced by combining pattern strings one after the other. In the following example, I've created a regular expression that searches for a number strictly followed by a word. The pattern string that generates the regular expression is composed of the following:

• A pattern string that matches a sequence of digits: [0-9]+
• A pattern string that matches a whitespace character: \s
• A pattern string that matches a sequence of letters: [a-z]+
• A pattern string that matches either the end of the string or a whitespace character: (\s|$)

....number_then_word = re.compile("[0-9]+\s[a-z]+(\s|$)")if number_then_word.search("1234 asdf"):    print("'1234 asdf' is a match")if number_then_word.search("asdf ...