Data Science Essentials in Python

Unit 10

Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions

Regular expressions are a powerful mechanism for searching, splitting, and replacing strings based on pattern matching. The module re provides a pattern description language and a collection of functions for matching, searching, splitting, and replacing strings.

From the Python point of view, a regular expression is simply a string containing the description of a pattern. You can make pattern matching much more efficient if you compile a regular expression that you plan to use more than once:

compiledPattern = re.compile(pattern, flags=0)

Compilation substantially improves pattern matching time but doesn’t affect correctness. If you want, you can specify pattern matching flags, either at the ...