Track 7 · Lesson 8 of 11

Regular expressions: the basics

Describe text patterns with regular expressions and test them with re.search, re.match and re.fullmatch, using character classes, quantifiers and anchors.

You will be able to

• Explain what a regular expression is and why patterns are written as raw strings
• Choose between re.search(), re.match() and re.fullmatch(), and read a match object
• Use character classes (\d, \w, \s, [A-Z], [^...]) and quantifiers (*, +, ?, {n,m})
• Anchor patterns with ^, $ and \b, and escape special characters
• Replace a hand-written validator with a single fullmatch pattern