Python Standard Library

The regex Module

(Obsolete) The regex module, shown in Example 14-32, is the old (pre-1.5) regular expression machinery. New code should use re where possible.

Note that regex is faster than the re module used in Python 1.5.2, but slower than the new version used in 1.6 and later.

Example 14-32. Using the regex Module

File: regex-example-1.py

import regex

text = "Man's crisis of identity in the latter half of the 20th century"

p = regex.compile("latter") # literal
print p.match(text)
print p.search(text), repr(p.group(0))

p = regex.compile("[0-9]+") # number
print p.search(text), repr(p.group(0))

p = regex.compile("\<\w\w\>") # two-letter word
print p.search(text), repr(p.group(0))

p = regex.compile("\w+$") # word at the end
print p.search(text), repr(p.group(0))

-1
32 'latter'
51 '20'
13 'of'
56 'century'