Thank you! I appreciate that.

Thank you for the kind words, @plxiznogoud3328! I really try and stick to that Einstein quote when creating content in the hopes of making complex topics easily digestible without losing essential details. I'm grateful that you've noticed the effort. Stay tuned for more deep-diving content!

Sometimes you will see people pass the pattern into the re module directly instead of separating the pattern into its own variable. So for example, you might see some tutorials do it like so:
re.search('a.*', 'abcdef')

Notice how that uses the re movile directly and then passes in the pattern as the first argument? Doing it like we did in this video lets us search the pattern directly.

Hi @hassenmorad8096, thank you for reaching out! It's not uncommon to find parts of regular expressions (regex) challenging when starting out.

Regarding your query, 're.compile()' is a method in Python's regex module 're' which compiles a regex pattern into a regex object. This object can then be used to perform searches, which could aid in code reusability and efficiency, especially when you are working with a pattern that would be used multiple times in your code.

Additional resources to learn more about Python's 're' methods would be the official Python documentation. Here's the link: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html. It provides a thorough breakdown of what each method does.

Furthermore, if you want to practice and understand regex patterns interactively, you can use websites like https://regex101.com/.

I hope this helps! Please feel free to ask if you have further questions. Happy learning!

It starts at 0, but there is a newline character before "abc". I put that in so the text would be easier to read.

Hi @Lowzenza4, that's a very insightful question! In Python, indexing always starts at 0. So, when we got our search result (ABC), the indexing of 1 to 4 represents the Python string slicing mechanism. For string slicing in Python, the starting index is inclusive but the ending index isn't. So, in the case of "ABC", ‘A’ is at the index 0, 'B' at 1, 'C' at 2. Hence, when you slice it as [1:4], it starts at index 1 (B) and ends just before index 4 (which doesn't exist in 'ABC') effectively giving us 'BC'. However, when we used it in our code, the “ABC” string was not at the very beginning of the string we were analyzing, hence the indexes were not 0-3. I hope this clears up the confusion. Let me know if you have any more questions!

You should always be using raw strings just so you're sure it will work. There are some characters that Python will interpret differently if it isn't a raw string, so you want to be sure it's your regular expression interpreting the string and not Python.

Hi @waseemhussain1427, thanks for the great question! Raw strings in Python are extremely useful when working with regular expressions. Recall that in Python, a raw string is just a string prefixed with 'r', which tells Python not to handle backslashes in any special way. Normally, backslashes are used to specify special characters like tabs (\t) or new lines (\n). When using regular expressions, we often want to match patterns that may include backslashes, such as '\d' to match any digit, or '\w' to match any alphanumeric character. If Python interprets these patterns without the 'r' prefix, it'll understand the backslashes as escape characters, rather than a part of our regular expression. So, if you use a raw string, your regular expression will interpret the string literally, and not conflict with Python's own special string interpretations. So it is a good practice to use raw strings while writing regular expressions in Python to prevent unwanted behavior. I hope this answers your question. Keep exploring Python and asking great questions!

Thanks. And I'm going to go over greediness and group escaping in the advanced video. I was going to mention greediness in this video but it was getting a little long.

Thank you for your feedback, @iliyastrakovich! I'm glad you found the video helpful. You raise a good point about "greedy" matching and group escaping. They indeed play a crucial role when dealing with larger and more complex regular expressions. Given the scope of the video, I couldn't fit those topics in, but I do plan on addressing these topics in my upcoming videos on advanced usage of regular expressions where I'll cover these in detail. Stay tuned, and don't hesitate to reach out if you have more questions! Happy coding!

Could you try using the group method on your match and see if that works? Something like:
print(match.group(0))

Hi @CalibreAudio, thanks for reaching out with your question. It looks like you're getting the Match object itself as the output. To obtain a more meaningful output, specifically the 'span' index, you should print out the match.span() method after finding a match. This would look something like:

for match in matches:
print(match.span())

This will output tuples indicating the start and end indices of your match. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks! I'm glad you found it helpful

Thanks a lot for your positive feedback, @mralirezaaaaa! I'm thrilled that you found the video on Python's built-in re module helpful. Your words of appreciation mean a lot! If you have any questions or topics in Python you'd like me to cover in the future, always feel free to let me know under the comments section. Don't forget to share this video with anyone else who might benefit. Happy coding!

No worries :). Hope you found the videos helpful and best of luck with your job search!

Hey @satoshinakamoto171, no worries at all! Your dedication to learning is tremendous and is all the contribution needed. Don't underestimate the value of your engagement and encouragement, which is just as valuable, if not more, than monetary contribution. Remember, learning and applying these skills is an investment that will surely pay-off at the right time. Keep at it and best of luck with your job search! Don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions on the content. Keep learning!

Adding the ‘r’ prevents Python from interpreting the character in any special way, such as tabs and newlines like I showed in the example. But the regular expressions still interpret those characters. So escaping them just prevents them from being interpreted by the regular expression. For example, if you want the dot character to be interpreted by the regular expression literally then it needs to be escaped. So to answer your question, there is a difference between the python language interpreting your string and the regular expression interpreting the string. I hope that makes sense.

Hey @hassenmorad8096, you have a great question there. No, metacharacters are not an exception in this case. When I mentioned about prefixing a string with 'r', what it does is to tell Python to treat the string as a raw string, i.e., backslashes will not be treated as escape characters. So, when you see r'\.', it's actually a string that contains a backslash and a dot.

Now back to the regex behavior. The backslash in regex has a special meaning; it's used to indicate that the immediate character following it, if it's a metacharacter, should be treated as a plain character instead. So you use '\.' to indicate you're searching for a literal dot, because just '.' in regex would match any character except a new line.

So when we say r'\.', the 'r' just ensures Python doesn't interfere by interpreting the backslash (Python's escape character) in any way before the regex gets to do its thing. So it sees the backslash character as is, which then allows the regex engine to use it for its intended purpose, and in this case, to escape the dot metacharacter. I hope that clears up for you, and keep the questions coming. They always help everyone in their learning journey!

I have it written down as a topic to cover but I don’t have any plans on when that will be. I’ll try to get around to it after my next data science series.

Thank you so much for the kind words, @aashishmehtoliya5800. I'm thrilled to know that you find my videos helpful. About your question on web scraping in Selenium; yes, I do have plans to cover this topic in the future. Stay tuned to the channel for upcoming videos. And don't forget to subscribe and hit the notification bell to be alerted when new content is up. More exciting Python topics await us! Thanks for being a part of our learning community!