Learn Python Regular Expressions step by step from beginner to advanced levels

Python re(gex)?

Learn Python Regular Expressions step by step from beginner to advanced levels with 200+ examples

The book also includes exercises to test your understanding, which is presented together as a single file in this repo - Exercises.md

See Version_changes.md to keep track of changes made to the book.

E-book

• You can download the book from any of these links
  • https://leanpub.com/py_regex
    • You might find reduced price using this coupon https://leanpub.com/py_regex/c/P7erPYAm1386
  • https://gumroad.com/l/py_regex
• You can also get the book as a bundle:
  • Python 201: Intermediate Python + Python re(gex)? from https://leanpub.com/b/python201_and_regex
    • Python 201 is authored by Michael Driscoll
  • Awesome Regex bundle from https://leanpub.com/b/regex or https://gumroad.com/l/regex
  • (Python|Ruby) regex from https://leanpub.com/b/pythonrubyregex
• See https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ for list of other books

For a preview of the book, see sample chapters

The book can also be viewed as a single markdown file in this repo. See my blogpost on generating pdf from markdown using pandoc if you are interested in the ebook creation process.

Feedback

Please open an issue if you spot any typo/errors.

I’d also highly appreciate your feedback about the book.

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47142552-python-re-gex

Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample

Table of Contents

1. Preface
2. Why is it needed?
3. Regular Expression modules
4. Anchors
5. Alternation and Grouping
6. Escaping metacharacters
7. Dot metacharacter and Quantifiers
8. Working with matched portions
9. Character class
10. Groupings and backreferences
11. Lookarounds
12. Flags
13. Unicode
14. Miscellaneous
15. Gotchas
16. Further Reading

Acknowledgements

• Python documentation - manuals and tutorials
• /r/learnpython/ - helpful forum for beginners and experienced programmers alike
• stackoverflow - for getting answers to pertinent questions on Python and regular expressions
• tex.stackexchange - for help on pandoc and tex related questions
• Cover image: draw.io, tree icon by Gopi Doraisamy under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported and wand icon by roundicons.com
• Warning and Info icons by Amada44 under public domain
• softwareengineering.stackexchange and skolakoda for programming quotes
• David Cortesi for helpful feedback on both the technical content and grammar issues
• Kye for spotting a typo

Special thanks to Al Sweigart, for introducing me to Python with his awesome automatetheboringstuff book and video course.

Contributing

• Open an issue for suggestions, bugs, typos, etc

License

The book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

The code snippets are licensed under MIT, see LICENSE file