According to Python documentation
Python does not currently have an equivalent to scanf(). Regular expressions are generally more powerful, though also more verbose, than scanf()format strings. The table below offers some more-or-less equivalent mappings between scanf() format tokens and regular expressions.
scanf() TokenRegular Expression
| %c | . |
| %5c | .{5} |
| %d | [-+]?\d+ |
| %e, %E, %f, %g | [-+]?(\d+(\.\d*)?|\.\d+)([eE][-+]?\d+)? |
| %i | [-+]?(0[xX][\dA-Fa-f]+|0[0-7]*|\d+) |
| %o | [-+]?[0-7]+ |
| %s | \S+ |
| %u | \d+ |
| %x, %X | [-+]?(0[xX])?[\dA-Fa-f]+ |
To extract the filename and numbers from a string like
/usr/sbin/sendmail - 0 errors, 4 warnings
you would use a scanf() format like
%s - %d errors, %d warnings
The equivalent regular expression would be
(\S+) - (\d+) errors, (\d+) warnings