Advanced Lesson 1
Regular Expressions
Chapter 2: Regular expression basics
Match any character
Ok, time to spice things up!
Let’s say instead of just "bop", you want to match any three letter words that start with a b and ends with a p.
So you want to be able to match the following strings: bop, bap, bmp, bbp, b2p, b#p, b&p, b!p, and b@p.
How would you write a regular expression for this?
You will use a special . character. The . represents any character except a new line.
>>> re.match("b.p", "bop")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 3), match='bop'>
>>> re.match("b.p", "b2p")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 3), match='b2p'>
>>> re.match("b.p", "b!p")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 3), match='b!p'>
If you need to match a full stop (.), you should escape it with a backslash (\).
>>> re.match("b.p\.", "bop.")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 4), match='bop.'>
Quick task
Write a regular expression to match all strings that have an e as its second and fourth letters.
Example valid strings: hehe, were, beke, tepe, eeee aeae.
Example invalid strings: eeaa, abcd, hello, care.
Try this - this should be a quick one!
>>> pattern = ".e.e"
>>> re.match(pattern, "were")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 4), match='were'>
>>> re.match(pattern, "care") # None
>>>