The Quick Python Book, Third Edition

Chapter 16. Regular expressions

This chapter covers

• Understanding regular expressions
• Creating regular expressions with special characters
• Using raw strings in regular expressions
• Extracting matched text from strings
• Substituting text with regular expressions

Some might wonder why I’m discussing regular expressions in this book at all. Regular expressions are implemented by a single Python module and are advanced enough that they don’t even come as part of the standard library in languages like C or Java. But if you’re using Python, you’re probably doing text parsing; if you’re doing that, regular expressions are too useful to be ignored. If you’ve used Perl, Tcl, or Linux/UNIX, you may be familiar with regular expressions; if not, this chapter ...