What are some basic examples of Python Regular Expressions?

Here are two basic examples of Python regular expressions

The re.match() method finds match if it occurs at start of the string. For example, calling match() on the string ‘TP Tutorials Point TP’ and looking for a pattern ‘TP’ will match. However, if we look for only Tutorials, the pattern will not match. Let’s check the code.

Example

import re result = re.match(r'TP', 'TP Tutorials Point TP')
print result

Output

<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x0000000005478648>

The re.search() method is similar to re.match() but it doesn’t limit us to find matches at the beginning of the string only. Unlike in re.match() method, here searching for pattern ‘Tutorials’ in the string ‘TP Tutorials Point TP’ will return a match. 

Example

import re
result = re.search(r'Tutorials', 'TP Tutorials Point TP')
print result.group()

Output

Tutorials

Here you can see that, search() method is able to find a pattern from any position of the string but it only returns the first occurrence of the search pattern.