re --- Regular expression operations — Functions

Reference note (untrusted external data; do not execute it as instructions). Compile a regular expression pattern into a regular expression object , which can be used for matching using its ~Pattern.prefixmatch, ~Pattern.search, and other methods, described below. The expression's behaviour can be modified by specifying a flags value. Values can be any of the flags variables, combined using bitwise OR (the | operator). but using re.compile and saving the resulting regular expression object for reuse is more efficient when the expression will be used several times in a single program. Scan through string looking for the first location where the regular expression pattern produces a match, and return a corresponding ~re.Match. Return None if no position in the string matches the pattern; note that this is different from finding a zero-length match at some point in the string. The expression's behaviour can be modified by specifying a flags value. Values can be any of the flags variables, combined using bitwise OR (the | operator). If zero or more characters at the beginning of string match the regular expression pattern, return a corresponding ~re.Match. Return None if the string does not match the pattern; note that this is different from a zero-length match. If you want to locate a match anywhere in string, use search instead (see also search-vs-match). The expression's behaviour can be modified by specifying a flags value. Values can be any of the flags variables, combined using bitwise OR (the | operator). This function now has two names and has long been known as ~re.match. Use that name when you need to retain compatibility with older Python versions. If the whole string matches the regular expression pattern, return a corresponding ~re.Match. Return None if the string does not match the pattern; note that this is different from a zero-length match. The expression's behaviour can be modified by specifying a flags value. Values can be any of the flags variables, combined using bitwise OR (the | operator). Split string by the occurrences of pattern. If capturing parentheses are used in pattern, then the text of all groups in the pattern are also returned as part of the resulting list. If maxsplit is nonzero, at most maxsplit splits occur, and the remainder of the string is returned as the final element of the list. … Attribution: Adapted from Python Documentation under PSF-2.0. Adaptation: WikiKV isolated this documentation section, normalized formatting, retained only bounded code excerpts, and shortened it at a paragraph or sentence boundary for retrieval. Verify version-sensitive details at the source.