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Mastering Python Regular Expressions

You're reading from   Mastering Python Regular Expressions For Python developers, this concise and down-to-earth guide to regular expressions

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Product type Paperback
Published in Feb 2014
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781783283156
Length 110 pages
Edition Edition
Languages
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Toc

Building blocks for Python regex


In Python, there are two different objects dealing with Regex:

  • RegexObject: It is also known as Pattern Object. It represents a compiled regular expression

  • MatchObject: It represents the matched pattern

RegexObject

In order to start matching patterns, we'll have to compile the regex. Python gives us an interface to do that as we've seen previously. The result will be a pattern object or RegexObject. This object has several methods for typical operations on regular expressions. As we will see later, the re module provides a shorthand for every operation so that we can avoid compiling it first.

>>> pattern = re.compile(r'fo+')

The compilation of a regular expression produces a reusable pattern object that provides all the operations that can be done, such as matching a pattern and finding all substrings that match a particular regex. So, for example, if we want to know if a string starts with <HTML>, we can use the following code:

>>> pattern...
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