home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
- From: Dave Mitchell <davem@magnet.com>
- Subject: Re: Regular expressions, pattern matching
- Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 15:20:51 GMT
-
- >
- > The Python library documentation says that pattern matching is done like
- > Emacs, and as far as I can see, gives no further explanation. I don't have the
- > faintest idea how Emacs pattern matching works, or how the various pattern
- > matching modules/functions interact, so can someone point me to something like
- > the extensive Perl documentation.
- >
-
- This is copied w/o permission from O'Reilly's perl book, p. 25
-
- . matches any character except newline
- [a-z0-9] matches any single character of set
- [^a-z0-9] matches any single character NOT in set
- \d matches a digit, same as [0-9]
- \D matches a non-digit, same as [^0-9]
- \w matches an alphanumeric (word) character [a-zA-Z0-9_]
- \W matches a non-word character [^a-zA-Z0-9_]
- \s matches a whitespace char (space, tab, newline...)
- \S matches a non-whitespace char
- \n matches a newline
- \r matches a return
- \t matches a tab
- \f matches a formfeed
- \b matches a backspace (inside [] only)
- \0 matches a null char
- \000 also matches a null char because...
- \nnn matches an ASCII char of that octal value
- \xnn matches an ASCII char of that hex value
- \cX matches an ASCII control char
- \metachar matches the char itself (\|,\.,\*...)
- (abc) remembers the match for later backreferences
- \1 matches the first set of parens matched
- \2 matches whatever the second set of parens matched
- \3 and so on...
-
- x? matches 0 or 1 x's, where x is any of the above
- x* matches 0 or more x's
- x+ matches 1 or more x's
- x{m,n} matches at least m x's but no more than n
-
- a,b,c matches all of a, b, and c in order
- fee|fie|foe matches one of fee, fie, or foe
-
- \b matches a word boundary (outside [] only)
- \B matches a non-word boundary
- ^ anchors match to the beginning of a line or string
- $ anchors match to the end of a line or string
-
-
-
-
- Dave
-
-
-