Extracting Multiple Matches
You’ve seen how we can use match to check whether a string matches a pattern and to extract capture groups within that pattern. Let’s take a look now at how we can use a pattern to extract many values from within a piece of text, a common requirement of text processing tasks. This will enable us to define a pattern once and then match arbitrary occurrences of it.
In these examples we’re going to work with the following block of text:
| | Here are the top ten countries by population, as of 2013 when the |
| | world population was 7 billion. |
| | |
| | China: 1,361,540,000 |
| | India: 1,237,510,000 |
| | United States: 317,234,000 |
| | Indonesia: 237,641,326 |
| | Brazil: 201,032,714 |
| | Pakistan: 185,028,000 |
| | Nigeria: 173,615,000 |
| | Bangladesh: 152,518,015 ... |
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