Intro to Python for Computer Science and Data Science: Learning to Program with AI, Big Data and The Cloud

8.12 Introduction to Regular Expressions

Sometimes you’ll need to recognize patterns in text, like phone numbers, e-mail addresses, ZIP Codes, web page addresses, Social Security numbers and more. A regular expression string describes a search pattern for matching characters in other strings.

Regular expressions can help you extract data from unstructured text, such as social media posts. They’re also important for ensuring that data is in the correct format before you attempt to process it.³

3. The topic of regular expressions might feel more challenging than most other Python features you’ve used. After mastering this subject, you’ll often write more concise code than with conventional string-processing techniques, speeding the code-development ...