Python Programming

So far we have tried to match regular expressions using the match() function.

This forces the regular expression to be matched from the start of a string.

If you remember, we also have search() function that matches a regular expression anywhere in a string.

If you need to force a regular expression to match the start of a string while using the search() function, then you will add a caret (^) to the beginning of your regular expression. This is a start of sentence marker.

>>> sentence = "oh baby"
>>> re.search("baby", sentence)
<re.Match object; span=(3, 7), match='baby'>
>>> re.match("baby", sentence) # None
>>> re.search("^baby", sentence) # None. "baby" not matched at the beginning.
>>> sentence = "baby yeah"
>>> re.search("^baby", sentence) 
<re.Match object; span=(0, 4), match='baby'>