The Quick Python Book

Chapter 17. 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

In some sense, we shouldn’t discuss regular expressions in this book at all. They’re 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; and if you’re doing that, then regular expressions are too useful to be ignored. If you use Perl, Tcl, or UNIX, you may be familiar with regular expressions; if not, this chapter will go into ...