Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

Matching multiple characters

With this information, we can match most strings of a known length, but most of the time, we don't know how many characters to match inside a pattern. Regular expressions can take care of this, too. We can modify a pattern by appending one of several hard-to-remember punctuation symbols to match multiple characters.

The asterisk (*) character says that the previous pattern can be matched zero or more times. This probably sounds silly, but it's one of the most useful repetition characters. Before we explore why, consider some silly examples to make sure we understand what it does:

'hello' matches pattern 'hel*o'
'heo' matches pattern 'hel*o'
'helllllo' matches pattern 'hel*o'  

So, the * character in the pattern ...