Regular Expression in Python with Examples | Set 1

Function compile()

# Module Regular Expression is imported using __import__(). 
import re 

# compile() creates regular expression character class [a-e], 
# which is equivalent to [abcde]. 
# class [abcde] will match with string with 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'. 
p = re.compile('[a-e]') 

# findall() searches for the Regular Expression and return a list upon finding 
print(p.findall("Aye, said Mr. Gibenson Stark")) 

['e', 'a', 'd', 'b', 'e', 'a']

\d   Matches any decimal digit, this is equivalent
     to the set class [0-9].
\D   Matches any non-digit character.
\s   Matches any whitespace character.
\S   Matches any non-whitespace character
\w   Matches any alphanumeric character, this is
     equivalent to the class [a-zA-Z0-9_].
\W   Matches any non-alphanumeric character. 

import re 

# \d is equivalent to [0-9]. 
p = re.compile('\d') 
print(p.findall("I went to him at 11 A.M. on 4th July 1886")) 

# \d+ will match a group on [0-9], group of one or greater size 
p = re.compile('\d+') 
print(p.findall("I went to him at 11 A.M. on 4th July 1886")) 

Output:

['1', '1', '4', '1', '8', '8', '6']
['11', '4', '1886']

import re 

# \w is equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_]. 
p = re.compile('\w') 
print(p.findall("He said * in some_lang.")) 

# \w+ matches to group of alphanumeric character. 
p = re.compile('\w+') 
print(p.findall("I went to him at 11 A.M., he said *** in some_language.")) 

# \W matches to non alphanumeric characters. 
p = re.compile('\W') 
print(p.findall("he said *** in some_language.")) 

Output:

['H', 'e', 's', 'a', 'i', 'd', 'i', 'n', 's', 'o', 'm', 'e', '_', 'l', 'a', 'n', 'g']
['I', 'went', 'to', 'him', 'at', '11', 'A', 'M', 'he', 'said', 'in', 'some_language']
[' ', ' ', '*', '*', '*', ' ', ' ', '.']