Regular Expression

A regular expression is a special sequence of characters that helps you match or find other strings or sets of strings, using a specialized syntax held in a pattern. Regular expressions are widely used in UNIX world.

The module re provides full support for Perl-like regular expressions in Python. The re module raises the exception re.error if an error occurs while compiling or using a regular expression.

We would cover two important functions, which would be used to handle regular expressions. But a small thing first: There are various characters, which would have special meaning when they are used in regular expression. To avoid any confusion while dealing with regular expressions, we would use Raw Strings as r'expression'.

The match Function
This function attempts to match RE pattern to string with optional flags.

Here is the syntax for this function -

re.match(pattern, string, flags=0)

- pattern = This is the regular expression to be matched.
- string = This is the string, which would be searched to match the pattern at the beginning of string.
- flags = You can specify different flags using bitwise OR (|). These are modifiers, which are listed in the table below

Example

import re

line = "Cats are smarter than dogs"

matchObj = re.match( r'(.*) are (.*?) .*', line, re.M|re.I)

if matchObj:
   print "matchObj.group() : ", matchObj.group()
   print "matchObj.group(1) : ", matchObj.group(1)
   print "matchObj.group(2) : ", matchObj.group(2)
else:
   print "No match!!"

Output :

matchObj.group() :  Cats are smarter than dogs
matchObj.group(1) :  Cats
matchObj.group(2) :  smarter