Regular Expressions and Building Regexes in Python

Christopher Trudeau
Christopher Trudeau 14 Lessons 1h 53m basics python

In this course, you’ll explore regular expressions, also known as regexes, in Python. A regex is a special sequence of characters that defines a pattern for complex string-matching functionality.

String matching like this is a common task in programming, and you can get a lot done with string operators and built-in methods. At times, though, you may need more sophisticated pattern-matching capabilities.

In this course, you’ll learn:

  • How to access the re module, which implements regex matching in Python
  • How to use re.search() to match a pattern against a string
  • How to create complex matching pattern with regex metacharacters
  • Explore more functions, beyond re.search(), that the re module provides
  • Learn when and how to precompile a regex in Python into a regular expression object
  • Discover useful things that you can do with the match object returned by the functions in the re module

What’s Included:

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About Christopher Trudeau

Christopher has a passion for the Python language and writes for Real Python. He is a consultant who helps advise organizations on how to improve their technical teams.

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Each tutorial at Real Python is created by a team of developers so that it meets our high quality standards. The team members who worked on this tutorial are:

Participant Comments

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aniketbarphe on Nov. 25, 2021

Great Course! Thank You!

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Shubha on Oct. 17, 2021

Great Course! Enjoyed learning lots of new stuff using regex. Thank you.

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datagirl-89 on May 10, 2021

This was a great course and I learned a lot. I used it to complete some assignments in another regex module on Coursera that didn’t provide the instruction I needed to fully understand the concepts. I would have liked a few examples of re.finditer() and when to use that. Otherwise, it was outstanding. Thanks!!

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nullrealpython on April 17, 2021

Christopher, your clarification of what multiline mode means may well have launched my career. Thanks! Whatever we are paying you… it ain’t enough.

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Dirk on March 22, 2021

Thank you for the good course. Everything well to the point. Will help me in my work.

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Cici Du on Feb. 9, 2021

Great course! I have struggled to apply regex after my first 2 courses in Python, so I took this course specifically for regex. This course explains things thoroughly!

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raulfz on Feb. 2, 2021

Excellent course, it was really helpful to see how regex are used in the python standard library.

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Ghani on Nov. 22, 2020

Excellent course! I like very much the review at the start of each new lesson. Well-done and thanks.

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