Beginners Tutorial For Regular Expressions in Python - Python Learning

11/23/2016
BeginnersTutorialforRegularExpressionsinPython|PythonLearning
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Beginners Tutorial for Regular Expressions in

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Importance of Regular Expressions
https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2015/06/regularexpressionpython/
1/23
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In last few years, there has been a dramatic shift in usage of general purpose programming
languages for data science and machine learning. This was not always the case a decade back
this thoughtwould have met a lot of skeptic eyes!
This means that more people / organizations are using tools like Python / JavaScript for solving
their data needs. This is where Regular Expressions become super useful. Regular expressions are
normally the default way of data cleaning and wrangling in most of these tools. Be it extraction of
speci c parts of text from web pages, making sense of twitter data or preparing your data for text
mining Regular expressions are your best bet for all these tasks.
Given their applicability, it makes sense to know them and use them appropriately.
What you will learn fromthis article?

In this article, I will walk you through usage, examples and applications of Regular Expressions.
Regular Expression are very popular among programmers and can be applied in many
programming languages like Java, JS, php, C++ etc. For developing our understanding, we have
explained
this
concept
using
Python
programming
language
(https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/learning-paths-data-science-business-analytics-businessintelligence-big-data/learning-path-data-science-python/). Towards the end, I have solved

various problems using regular expressions.
(https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/caracters008.jpg)
Lets get started!
What is Regular Expression and how is it used?

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What is Regular Expression and how is it used?
Simply put, regular expression is a sequence of character(s) mainly used to nd and replace
patterns in a string or le. As I mentioned before, they are supported by most of the programming
languages like python (https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2014/07/baby-steps-learningpython-data-analysis/), perl, R (https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/learning-paths-data-sciencebusiness-analytics-business-intelligence-big-data/learning-path-r-data-science/),
Java
and
many others. So, learning them helps in multiple ways (more on this later).
Regular expressions usetwo types of characters:
a) Meta characters: As the name suggests, these characters have a special meaning, similar to * in
wild card.
b) Literals (like a,b,1,2)
In Python, we have module re that helpswith regular expressions. So you need toimport library
re before you can useregular expressions in Python.
Usethiscode>Importre
The most common uses of regular expressions are:

Search a string (search and match)
Finding a string ( ndall)
Break string into a sub strings (split)
Replace part of a string (sub)
Lets look at the methods that library re provides to perform thesetasks.
What are various methods of Regular Expressions?

The re package provides multiple methods to perform queries on an input string.Here are the
most commonly used methods, I will discuss:
1. re.match()
2. re.search()
3. re. ndall()
4. re.split()
5. re.sub()
6. re.compile()
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Lets look at them one by one.
re.match(pattern,string):
This method nds match if itoccurs at start of the string. For example, calling match() on the string
AV Analytics AV and looking for a pattern AV will match. However,if we look for only Analytics,
the pattern will not match. Letsperform it in python now.
Code
importre
result=re.match(r'AV','AVAnalyticsVidhyaAV')
printresult
Output:
<_sre.SRE_Matchobjectat0x0000000009BE4370>
Above, it showsthat pattern match has been found. To print the matching string welluse method
group (It helps to return the matching string). Use r at the start of the pattern string, it designates
a python raw string.
printresult.group(0)
Output:
AV
Lets now nd Analytics in the given string. Here we seethat string is not starting with AV so it
should return no match. Lets see what we get:
Code
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result=re.match(r'Analytics','AVAnalyticsVidhyaAV')
printresult
Output:
None
There aremethods like start() and end() to know the start and end position of matching pattern in
the string.
Code
printresult.start()
printresult.end()
Output:
0
2
Above you can see that start and end position of matching pattern AV in the string and sometime
it helps a lot whileperforming manipulation with the string.
re.search(pattern,string):
Itis similar to match() but it doesnt restrict us to nd matches at the beginning of the string only.
Unlike previous method, here searching for pattern Analyticswill return a match.
Code
result=re.search(r'Analytics','AVAnalyticsVidhyaAV')
printresult.group(0)
Output:
Analytics
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Here you can see that, search() method is able to nd a pattern from any position of the string but
it only returns the rst occurrence of the search pattern.
re.findall (pattern,string):
Ithelps to get a list of all matching patterns. It has no constraints of searching from start or end. If
we will use method ndall to search AV in given string it will return both occurrence of AV.
While searching a string, I would recommend you to use re. ndall() always, it can work like
re.search() and re.match() both.
Code
result=re.findall(r'AV','AVAnalyticsVidhyaAV')
printresult
Output:
['AV','AV']
re.split(pattern,string, [maxsplit=0]):
This methods helps to splitstringby the occurrences ofgiven pattern.
Code
result=re.split(r'y','Analytics')
result
Output:
['Anal','tics']
Above, we have split the string Analytics by y. Method split() has another argument maxsplit. It
has default value of zero. In this case it does the maximum splits that can be done, but if we give
value to maxsplit, it will split the string. Lets look at the example below:
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Code
result=re.split(r'i','AnalyticsVidhya')
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestprintresult
tree-based-algorithms/)
Output:
['Analyt','csV','dhya']#Ithasperformedallthesplitsthatcanbedonebypattern"i".
Code
result=re.split(r'i','AnalyticsVidhya',maxsplit=1)
result
Output:
['Analyt','csVidhya']
Here, you can notice that we have xed the maxsplit to 1. And the result is,it has only two values
whereas rst example has three values.
re.sub(pattern,repl,string):
It helps to search a pattern and replace with a new sub string. If the pattern is notfound, stringis
returned unchanged.
Code
result=re.sub(r'India','theWorld','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/theresult
strategic-monk/)
Output:
'AVislargestAnalyticscommunityoftheWorld'
re.compile(pattern,repl,string):
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re.compile(pattern,repl,string):
We can combine a regular expression pattern into pattern objects, which can be used for pattern
matching. It also helps to search a pattern again without rewriting it.
Code /datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltest(https:/
importre
pattern=re.compile('AV')
result=pattern.findall('AVAnalyticsVidhyaAV')
printresult
result2=pattern.findall('AVislargestanalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult2
Output:
['AV','AV']
['AV']
Quick Recap of various methods:

Till now, we looked at various methods of regular expression using a constant pattern ( xed
characters). But, what if we do not have a constant search pattern and we want to return speci c
set of characters (de ned by a rule) from a string? Dont be intimidated.
This can easily be solved by de ning an expression with the help of pattern operators (meta and
literal characters). Lets look at the most common pattern operators.
What are the most commonly used operators?

Regular
expressions can specify patterns, not just xed characters. Here are the most commonly
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/thestrategic-monk/)
used operators that helps to generate an expression to represent required characters in a string or
le. It is commonly used in web scrapping and text mining to extract required information.
Operators
Description
Matches with any single character except newline \n.
match 0 or 1 occurrence of the pattern to its left
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1 or more occurrences of the pattern to its left
0 or more occurrences of the pattern to its left
Matches with a alphanumeric character whereas\W(upper case W) matches non alphanume

(https:/
\w /datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestcharacter.
\d
Matches with digits [0-9] and/D(upper case D) matches with non-digits.
\s
Matches with a single white space character (space, newline, return, tab, form) and\S(upper
matches any non-white space character.
\b
boundary between word and non-word and /B is opposite of /b
[..]
Matches any single character in a square bracket and[^..]matches any single character not in
bracket
It is used for special meaning characters like\. to match a period or \+ for plus sign.
^ and $
^ and $ match the start or end of the string respectively
{n,m}
Matches at least n and at most m occurrences of preceding expression if we write it as {,m} th

will return at least any minimum occurrence to max m preceding expression.
a| b
Matches either a or b
()
Groups regular expressions and returns matched text
\t, \n, \r
Matches tab, newline, return
For more details on meta characters (, ),| and others details, you can refer this link
(https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html (https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html)).
Now, lets understand the pattern operators by looking at the below examples.
Some Examples of Regular Expressions
Problem 1: Return the first word of a given
string
Solution-1 Extract each character (using \w)

Code
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importre
result=re.findall(r'.','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltest
Output:
['A','V','','i','s','','l','a','r','g','e','s','t','','A','n','a','l','y',
't','i','c','s','','c','o','m','m','u','n','i','t','y','','o','f','','I',
'n','d','i','a']
Above, space is also extracted, now to avoid it use \w instead of ..
Code
result=re.findall(r'\w','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['A','V','i','s','l','a','r','g','e','s','t','A','n','a','l','y','t','i','c',
's','c','o','m','m','u','n','i','t','y','o','f','I','n','d','i','a']
Solution-2 Extract each word(using * or +)

Code
result=re.findall(r'\w*','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/theprintresult
strategic-monk/)
Output:
['AV','','is','','largest','','Analytics','','community','','of','','India','']
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Again, it is returning space as a word because * returns zero or more matches of pattern to its left.
Now to remove spaces we will go with +.
Code /datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltest(https:/
result=re.findall(r'\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['AV','is','largest','Analytics','community','of','India']
Solution-3Extract each word(using ^)

Code
result=re.findall(r'^\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['AV']
If we will use $ instead of ^, it will return the word from the end of the string. Lets look at it.
Code
result=re.findall(r'\w+$','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/theOutput:
strategic-monk/)
[India]
Problem 2: Return the first two character of each word

Solution-1 Extract consecutivetwo charactersof each word, excluding spaces (using \w)
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Code
result=re.findall(r'\w\w','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestprintresult
Output:
['AV','is','la','rg','es','An','al','yt','ic','co','mm','un','it','of','In','di']
Solution-2 Extract consecutivetwo characters those available at start of word boundary(using \b)
Code
result=re.findall(r'\b\w.','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['AV','is','la','An','co','of','In']
Problem 3: Return the domain type of given email-ids

To explain it in simple manner,I will again go with a stepwise approach:
Solution-1Extract allcharacters after @
Code
result=re.findall(r'@\w+','abc.test@gmail.com,xyz@test.in,test.first@analyticsvidhya.com,first.
test@rest.biz')
printresult
Output:['@gmail','@test','@analyticsvidhya','@rest']
Above, you can see that .com, .in part is not extracted. To add it, we will go with below code.
12/23
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result=re.findall(r'@\w+.\w+','abc.test@gmail.com,xyz@test.in,test.first@analyticsvidhya.com,fi
rst.test@rest.biz')
printresult
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestOutput:
['@gmail.com','@test.in','@analyticsvidhya.com','@rest.biz']
Solution 2 Extract only domain name using ( )

Code
result=re.findall(r'@\w+.(\w+)','abc.test@gmail.com,xyz@test.in,test.first@analyticsvidhya.com,
first.test@rest.biz')
printresult
Output:
['com','in','com','biz']
Problem 4:Return date from given string

Here we will use \d to extract digit.
Solution:
Code
result=re.findall(r'\d{2}\d{2}\d{4}','Amit34345612052007,XYZ56453211112011,ABC6789
4512012009')
printresult
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/theOutput:
strategic-monk/)
['12052007','11112011','12012009']
If you want to extract only year again parenthesis ( ) will help you.
Code
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result=re.findall(r'\d{2}\d{2}(\d{4})','Amit34345612052007,XYZ56453211112011,ABC67
894512012009')
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestprintresult
Output:
['2007','2011','2009']
Problem 5:Return all words of a string those starts with vowel

Solution-1Return each words
Code
result=re.findall(r'\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['AV','is','largest','Analytics','community','of','India']
Solution-2Return words starts with alphabets (using [])

Code
result=re.findall(r'[aeiouAEIOU]\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/the['AV','is','argest','Analytics','ommunity','of','India']
strategic-monk/)
Above you can see that it has returned argest and ommunity from the mid of words. To drop these
two, we need to use \b for word boundary.
Solution- 3
Code
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result=re.findall(r'\b[aeiouAEIOU]\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestOutput:
['AV','is','Analytics','of','India']
In similar ways, we can extract words those starts with constant using ^ within square bracket.
Code
result=re.findall(r'\b[^aeiouAEIOU]\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['is','largest','Analytics','community','of','India']
Above you can see that it has returned words starting with space. To drop it from output, include space in
square bracket[].
Code
result=re.findall(r'\b[^aeiouAEIOU]\w+','AVislargestAnalyticscommunityofIndia')
printresult
Output:
['largest','community']
Problem 6:Validate a phone number (phone number must be of 10 digits and

starts with 8 or 9)
We have a list phone numbers in list li and here we will validate phone numbers using regular
Solution
Code
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importre
li=['9999999999','999999999','99999x9999']
forvalinli:
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestifre.match(r'[89]{1}[09]{9}',val)andlen(val)==10:
print'yes'
else:
print'no'
Output:
yes
no
no
Problem 7:Split a string with multiple delimiters

Solution
Code
importre
line='asdffjdk;afed,fjek,asdf,foo'#Stringhasmultipledelimiters(";",",","").
result=re.split(r'[;,\s]',line)
printresult
Output:
['asdf','fjdk','afed','fjek','asdf','foo']
We can also use method re.sub()to replace these multiple delimiters with one as space .
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/theCode
strategic-monk/)
16/23
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importre
line='asdffjdk;afed,fjek,asdf,foo'
result=re.sub(r'[;,\s]','',line)
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestprintresult
Output:
asdffjdkafedfjekasdffoo
Problem 8: Retrieve Information from HTML file

I want to extract information from a HTML le (see below sample data). Here we need to extract
information available between <td> and </td> except the rst numerical index. I have assumed
here that below html code is stored in a string str.
Sample HTML le (str)
<tralign="center"><td>1</td><td>Noah</td><td>Emma</td></tr>
<tralign="center"><td>2</td><td>Liam</td><td>Olivia</td></tr>
<tralign="center"><td>3</td><td>Mason</td><td>Sophia</td></tr>
<tralign="center"><td>4</td><td>Jacob</td><td>Isabella</td></tr>
<tralign="center"><td>5</td><td>William</td><td>Ava</td></tr>
<tralign="center"><td>6</td><td>Ethan</td><td>Mia</td></tr>
<tralign="center"><td>7</td><tdHTML>Michael</td><td>Emily</td></tr>
Solution:
Code
result=re.findall(r'<td>\w+</td>\s<td>(\w+)</td>\s<td>(\w+)</td>',str)
printresult
(https:/
/datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/thestrategic-monk/)
Output:
[('Noah','Emma'),('Liam','Olivia'),('Mason','Sophia'),('Jacob','Isabella'),('William','Av
a'),('Ethan','Mia'),('Michael','Emily')]
You can read html le using library urllib2 (see below code).
Code
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importurllib2
response=urllib2.urlopen('')
html=response.read()
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltesttree-based-algorithms/)
End Notes
In this article, we discuss about the regular expression, methods and meta characters to form a
regular expression. We have also looked at various examples to see the practical uses of it. Here I
have tried to introduce you with regular expression and cover most common methods to solve
maximum of regular expression problems.
Did you nd the article useful? Do let us know your thoughts about this guide in the comments
section below.
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In "Business Analytics"
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Author
Sunil Ray (https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/author/sunil-ray/)

I am a Business Analytics and Intelligence professional with deep experience in the Indian
Insurance industry. I have worked for various multi-national Insurance companies in last 7 years.
4 COMMENTS
Rami BelgacemREPLY
says:
(HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/2015/06/REGULAR-EXPRESSION-PYTHON/?REPLYTOCOM=88000#RESPOND)
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/theJUNE 8, 2015 AT 10:03 AM (HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/2015/06/REGULAR-EXPRESSION-PYTHON/#COMMENTstrategic-monk/)

88000)
Great tuto (y)
Gopinathan K.Munappy
says:
REPLY (HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/2015/06/REGULAR-EXPRESSION-PYTHON/?REPLYTOCOM=88557#RESPOND)
JUNE 14, 2015 AT 10:25 AM (HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/2015/06/REGULAR-EXPRESSION-PYTHON/#COMMENT88557)
20/23
11/23/2016
Is it not a Python programming language aspect than the theme of the site Analytics?
(https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/skilltestsanthi says: REPLY (HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/2015/06/REGULAR-EXPRESSION-PYTHON/?REPLYTOCOM=93405#RESPOND)

AUGUST 24, 2015 AT 6:15 AM (HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/2015/06/REGULAR-EXPRESSIONPYTHON/#COMMENT-93405)
i am new to python programing, its very useful to me .

i need remaining functions in regular expression
Raju Kommarajula
REPLY says:
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Beginners Tutorial For Regular Expressions in Python - Python Learning

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Beginners Tutorial For Regular Expressions in Python - Python Learning

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11/23/2016

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Beginners Tutorial for Regular Expressions in

Importance of Regular Expressions

What you will learn fromthis article?

(https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/learning-paths-data-science-business-analytics-businessintelligence-big-data/learning-path-data-science-python/). Towards the end, I have solved

Lets get started!

What is Regular Expression and how is it used?

What is Regular Expression and how is it used?

The most common uses of regular expressions are:

Lets look at the methods that library re provides to perform thesetasks.

What are various methods of Regular Expressions?

Lets look at them one by one.

Quick Recap of various methods:

What are the most commonly used operators?

Matches with any single character except newline \n.

match 0 or 1 occurrence of the pattern to its left

1 or more occurrences of the pattern to its left

0 or more occurrences of the pattern to its left

Matches with a alphanumeric character whereas\W(upper case W) matches non alphanume

Matches with digits [0-9] and/D(upper case D) matches with non-digits.

boundary between word and non-word and /B is opposite of /b

^ and $ match the start or end of the string respectively

Matches at least n and at most m occurrences of preceding expression if we write it as {,m} th

Groups regular expressions and returns matched text

Matches tab, newline, return

Some Examples of Regular Expressions

Solution-1 Extract each character (using \w)

Above, space is also extracted, now to avoid it use \w instead of ..

Solution-2 Extract each word(using * or +)

Solution-3Extract each word(using ^)

Problem 2: Return the first two character of each word

Problem 3: Return the domain type of given email-ids

Solution 2 Extract only domain name using ( )

Problem 4:Return date from given string

Problem 5:Return all words of a string those starts with vowel

Solution-2Return words starts with alphabets (using [])

Problem 6:Validate a phone number (phone number must be of 10 digits and

Problem 7:Split a string with multiple delimiters

Problem 8: Retrieve Information from HTML file

Sample HTML le (str)

Steps for effective text data

Baby steps in Python - Libraries

TAGS: META CHARATERS (HTTPS://WWW.ANALYTICSVIDHYA.COM/BLOG/TAG/META-CHARATERS/), PATTERN OPERATORS

Cheat Sheet for Exploratory Data Analysis in Python

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i am new to python programing, its very useful to me .

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