Introduction to Regular Expressions in Python

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Introduction

Regular expressions are sequences of characters that form a search pattern, mainly used for string searching and manipulation. In Python, they are implemented through the built-in 're' module.

Basic Concepts

• Patterns: Specific sequences of characters that represent a search criteria.

• Metacharacters: Special characters that signify broader types of patterns (like '*', '+', '?').

• Character Classes: Represent a set of characters that match any one character from the set (like '\d', '\w', '\s').

Use Cases

• String Parsing: Extracting specific information from text.
• Data Validation: Ensuring formats of data are correct (like emails, phone numbers, passwords).
• Text Preprocessing: Used in natural language processing for tasks like tokenization, cleaning data.