Python regular expressions

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

How can we invoke regular expressions using Python?

Objectives

Introduce regex capabilities in Python

Regular expressions, with search, replace and other capabilities, are available in through Python through the ‘re’ library. E.g. import re.

Patterns follow all the same syntax you’ve learnt using grep and sed. However, you’ll usually find that the following patterns work that didn’t work with Grep:

Written as	Equivalent to
\d	[0-9] A digit
\D	[^0-9] Not a digit
\t	A tab character
\n	A newline

Python regexs, using the ‘re’ library, are implemented through functions, where search patterns and strings are given as function arguments.

Searching

The grep equivalent is the function re.search().
match = re.search( pattern, string )
The returned match object looks “true” if there was a match and has functions for interrogating aspects of the match, for example individual bracketed groups matched and span range of matched parts.

import re
match = re.search(r'\b(\d+) (\w+)', 'word1 1234 word2')
if match:
    print(match.group(0))
    print(match.span(0))
    print(match.group(1))
    print(match.group(2))
else:
    print("No Match")

1234 word2
(6, 16)
1234
word2

Note the ‘r’ in front of the search pattern, r'\b(\d+) (\w+)'. This enables the pattern string to be passed to the re function in its literal form, which prevents backslashes being being interpreted as escapes too early, before the function looks at it. Without the preceeding ‘r’, double-backslashes would be necessary.
E.g. '\\b(\\d+) (\\w+)'

Splitting

A neat ‘re’ feature is splitting of a string into an array of substrings, using a regex as a delimiter, instead of just a literal comma or tab or space, etc.. With this functionality, you can, for example, split up a line into individual words, using a regex “anything that’s not a word” as the delimiter for the split.

listOfWords = re.split(r'\W+', 'word_1 $%^ 1234,word2-word3')
print(listOfWords)

['word_1', '1234', 'word2', 'word3']

Substituting

Substitution commands in Python ‘re’ take the form:
newstring = re.sub( pattern, replacement, string )
Again, both the pattern and replacement/back-reference syntax is as we’ve learnt already.

import re
oldstring = 'Four 123 Five'
newstring = re.sub( r'(\w+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\w+)', r'\2-\1-\3', oldstring )
print(newstring)

'123-Four-Five'

More reference for the Python ‘re’ library may be found at: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html

Key Points

Regular expressions through Python:

import re

match = re.search(r'pattern', 'string')

or

list = re.split(r'pattern', 'string')

or

re.sub( r'pattern', r'replacement', 'string' )

Reference: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html

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