An Introduction to RegEx In Python

Everything you need to get started with regex

Photo made by the author on Carbon

A lot of times, we need to match some specific patterns of text from our data and retrieve that sentence, or when we are scraping websites, we need to match a generalized pattern to look for and get data according to that.

So, are you scraping websites? Or working on an NLP project? Or are you a network engineer? Well, regex is useful in all these roles and beyond.

Regex helps us to find some specific pattern of the word (or even the exact word) from thousands of lines of text data.

We’ll work with regex and learn it using python. To use regex in python, we need to import an in-built module named “re”.

import re

We have some widely used functions in the re module to help us with any kind of work we may need. Before we dive into the functions let’s see how we can write our patterns.

Note that the pattern is language independent and we can write the same pattern for any language that supports regex and we will get the exact same results.

Metacharacters

The metacharacters in a regex pattern are characters with special meanings. We will see these more in action when we will learn about functions, but…