

You’ll find it in many other programming languages, too. The whitespace character is, in contrast to the newline character, a special symbol of the regex libraries.

For example, the regex 'hello\n\tworld' matches the string that consists of 'hello' in the first line and ' world' in the second line (with a leading tab character). It just encodes the tabular space ' ' which is different to a sequence of whitespaces (even if it doesn’t look different over here). The tabular character is, like the newline character, not a “regex-specific” symbol. For example, the regex 'hello\nworld' matches a string where the string 'hello' is placed in one line and the string 'world' is placed into the second line. However, you’ll see the newline character so often that I just couldn’t write this list without including it. The newline symbol is not a special symbol particular to regex only, it’s actually one of the most widely-used, standard characters. Let’s have a look at the following table that contains all special characters in Python’s re package for regular expression processing. So what are the special characters you can use in your regex patterns? In most cases, they use more advanced constructs or special characters for various reasons such as brevity, expressiveness, or generality. In fact, regex experts seldomly match literal characters. The latter is a special regex character-and pros know them by heart. Instead of writing the character set, you’d write or even \w. However, the power of regular expressions come from their abstraction capability. In principle, you can use all Unicode literal characters in your regex pattern. An important class of characters are the literal characters.

Summary: Regular expressions are built from characters. For example, the regex pattern 'an' matches the last two characters in the string 'hello woman'. You can also search for the pattern 'a' in the string 'hello woman' and there is a match: the second last character in the string.īased on the simple insight that a literal character is a valid regex pattern, you’ll find that a combination of literal characters is also a valid regex pattern. So the literal characters 'a', 'b', and 'c' are all valid regex patterns.įor example, you can search for the regex pattern 'a' in the string 'hello world' but it won’t find a match. What’s a pattern? In its most basic form, a pattern can be a literal character. Let’s start with the absolute first thing you need to know with regular expressions: a regular expression (short: regex) searches for a given pattern in a given string. Which Special Python Regex Characters Must Be Escaped?.We match two strings to the pattern and print the output (a Boolean returned by the matches() method). The matcher method creates a matcher that matches the given input against the pattern. This pattern can be matched with any character sequence against the regular expression using the Matcher object. We’ll use this pattern to make a Matcher object later. The compile() method creates a pattern from the specified regular expression.
Regex special characters password#
