9 Text

9.1 Regular Expressions (regex)

Regular Expressions are provided by the re package, which is bundled with most Python distributions.

To use this package, you need to “compile” your regex using the re.compile() function then calling the methods from the returned object.

# Import the regular expression module
import re
# Compile the pattern: prog
prog = re.compile('\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}')
# See if the pattern matches
result = prog.match('123-456-7890')
print(bool(result))
# See if the pattern matches

## True

result2 = prog.match('1123-456-7890')
print(bool(result2))

## False

You can also pass the pattern into re.match() directly, but it seems like this compilation thing will be useful later on.