In this tutorial, 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.

Earlier in this series, in the tutorial Strings and Character Data in Python, you learned how to define and manipulate string objects. Since then, you’ve seen some ways to determine whether two strings match each other:

• You can test whether two strings are equal using the equality (==) operator.
• You can test whether one string is a substring of another with the in operator or the built-in string methods .find() and .index().

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 tutorial, 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

Fasten your seat belt! Regex syntax takes a little getting used to. But once you get comfortable with it, you’ll find regexes almost indispensable in your Python programming.

#python #regex