Regular expressions

So far we have been reading through files, looking for patterns and extracting various bits of lines that we find interesting. We have been using string methods like split and find and using lists and string slicing to extract portions of the lines.

This task of searching and extracting is so common that Python has a very powerful library called regular expressions that handles many of these tasks quite elegantly. The reason we have not introduced regular expressions earlier in the book is because while they are very powerful, they are a little complicated and their syntax takes some getting used to.

Regular expressions are almost their own little programming language for searching and parsing strings. As a matter of fact, entire books have been written on the topic of regular expressions. In this chapter, we will only cover the basics of regular expressions. For more detail on regular expressions, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression

http://docs.python.org/library/re.html

The regular expression library must be imported into your program before you can use it. The simplest use of the regular expression library is the search() function. The following program demonstrates a trivial use of the search function.