Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

Matching patterns

Regular expressions are a complicated mini-language. They rely on special characters to match unknown strings, but let's start with literal characters, such as letters, numbers, and the space character, which always match themselves. Let's see a basic example:

import re 
 
search_string = "hello world" 
pattern = "hello world" 
 
match = re.match(pattern, search_string) 
 
if match: 
    print("regex matches") 

The Python Standard Library module for regular expressions is called re. We import it and set up a search string and pattern to search for; in this case, they are the same string. Since the search string matches the given pattern, the conditional passes and the print statement executes.

Bear in mind that the match function matches ...