Lecture 30

Regular expressions

MCS 260 Fall 2021
Emily Dumas

Reminders

  • Homework 10 due tomorrow at 10am
  • Worksheet 11 coming this afternoon
  • Project 3 autograder open
  • Project 3 due Fri at 6pm
  • Loose end: Recursion pros and cons

    Often can solve a problem with recursion or with loops (an iterative solution). Why use recursion?

    Pros:

    • Short code
    • Clear code

    Unclear:

    • Speed

    Cons:

    • Uses more memory

    raw strings

    Recall that backslash \ in a string starts an escape sequence in Python.

    You can disable escape sequences by putting the letter r immediately before the quotation mark(s). This is known as a raw string. In a raw string, a single \ represents the \ character.

    However, raw strings cannot end with a single \

    
        >>> print("C:\\Users\\ddumas\n(home)")
        C:\Users\ddumas
        (home)
        >>> print(r"C:\\Users\\ddumas\n(home)")
        C:\\Users\\ddumas\n(home)
        >>> print(r"C:\Users\ddumas")
        C:\Users\ddumas
        >>> 
    

    Regular expressions

    Today we'll learn about the module re in Python, which supports a text searching language known as regular expressions or regexes.

    Some of its key functions include:

    • Searching for text matching a pattern
    • Replacing text matching a pattern

    Language support

    Regexes are a mini programming language for specifying patterns of text.

    Dialects of regex are supported in many programming languages. We'll cover the Python dialect.

    Minimal example

    Simplest usage: Find and replace a substring.

    
    import re
    s = "Avocado is usually considered a vegetable."
    print(re.sub("vegetable","fruit",s))
        
    re.sub(pattern, replacement, string)

    The first argument of re.sub is a pattern.

    Unless it contains characters with special meaning in a regex pattern, the pattern just matches substrings equal to the pattern.

    • "vegetable" matches the string "vegetable"
    • "foo" matches the string "foo"

    special characters in patterns

    • . — matches any character except newline
    • \s — matches any whitespace character
    • \d — matches a decimal digit
    • \w — matches a "word character" (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _)

    special characters for repetition

    • + — previous item must repeat 1 or more times
    • * — previous item must repeat 0 or more times
    • ? — previous item must repeat 0 or 1 times
    • {n} — previous item must appear n times

    Example problem

    Replace any price in whole dollars (written like $2 or $1999) with the string -PRICE-.

    Note: $ is a special character. To match a dollar sign, put \$ in the pattern.

    Searching without replacing

    • re.match(pattern,string) — does string begin with a match to pattern? Return a match object or None.
    • re.search(pattern,string) — does string contain a match to the pattern? Return a match object or None.
    • re.finditer(pattern,string) — return an iterable yielding all the non-overlapping matches as match objects.

    Match objects

    Most regex functions return match objects that contain info about a part of the string matching the expression.

    A match object has a method .group() that returns the full text of the match.

    .start() and .end() return the indices where the match begins and ends in the string.

    Parentheses

    A part of a pattern in parentheses is a group. A group is treated as a unit for operators like +,*,?.

    e.g. pattern (ha)+ means one or more repetitions of ha.

    It matches ha or haha or hahaha but does not match Haha or h or hah.

    In contrast, ha+ means the letter h followed by one or more repetitions of a, e.g. haaaaaaa

    Retrieving groups

    Matched groups are available as .group(1), .group(2), etc., with the 1-based number referring to the order of left parentheses in the pattern.

    Group 0 always refers to the entire pattern.

    e.g. pattern   My name is (\w+).   will capture the name (not containing spaces!) in group 1.

    Example problem

    Find all of the phone numbers in a string that are written in the format 319-555-1012, and split each one into area code (e.g. 319), exchange (e.g. 555), and line number (e.g. 1012).

    References

    Revision history

    • 2021-11-01 Initial publication