Text Processing in Python

Chapter 3. Regular Expressions

Regular expressions allow extremely valuable text processing techniques, but ones that warrant careful explanation. Python's re module, in particular, allows numerous enhancements to basic regular expressions (such as named backreferences, lookahead assertions, backreference skipping, non-greedy quantifiers, and others). A solid introduction to the subtleties of regular expressions is valuable to programmers engaged in text processing tasks.

The prequel of this chapter contains a tutorial on regular expressions that allows a reader unfamiliar with regular expressions to move quickly from simple to complex elements of regular expression syntax. This tutorial is aimed primarily at beginners, but programmers familiar ...