Regular Expressions and Building Regexes in Python

In this course, 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.

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 course, 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
  • Explore more functions, beyond re.search(), that the re module provides
  • Learn when and how to precompile a regex in Python into a regular expression object
  • Discover useful things that you can do with the match object returned by the functions in the re module

What’s Included:

Downloadable Resources:

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About Christopher Trudeau

Christopher Trudeau Christopher Trudeau

Christopher has a passion for the Python language and writes for Real Python. He is a consultant who helps advise organizations on how to improve their technical teams.

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Participant Comments

aniketbarphe on Nov. 25, 2021

Great Course! Thank You!

Shubha on Oct. 17, 2021

Great Course! Enjoyed learning lots of new stuff using regex. Thank you.

datagirl-89 on May 10, 2021

This was a great course and I learned a lot. I used it to complete some assignments in another regex module on Coursera that didn’t provide the instruction I needed to fully understand the concepts. I would have liked a few examples of re.finditer() and when to use that. Otherwise, it was outstanding. Thanks!!

nullrealpython on April 17, 2021

Christopher, your clarification of what multiline mode means may well have launched my career. Thanks! Whatever we are paying you… it ain’t enough.

Dirk on March 22, 2021

Thank you for the good course. Everything well to the point. Will help me in my work.

Cici Du on Feb. 9, 2021

Great course! I have struggled to apply regex after my first 2 courses in Python, so I took this course specifically for regex. This course explains things thoroughly!

raulfz on Feb. 2, 2021

Excellent course, it was really helpful to see how regex are used in the python standard library.

Ghani on Nov. 22, 2020

Excellent course! I like very much the review at the start of each new lesson. Well-done and thanks.

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