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Pattern Matching Using Search

The document discusses using the search function in Python to find patterns in strings. It provides an example program that imports the re module, defines a text string and list of search strings, then loops through the list using search to find matches and print output.

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15 views2 pages

Pattern Matching Using Search

The document discusses using the search function in Python to find patterns in strings. It provides an example program that imports the re module, defines a text string and list of search strings, then loops through the list using search to find matches and print output.

Uploaded by

Anonymous gqSpNAmlW
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
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Pattern Matching Using search

Let’s take a moment to learn some pattern matching basics. When using
Python to look for a pattern in a string, you can use the search function like
we did in the example earlier in this chapter. Here’s how:

import re

text = "The ants go marching one by one"

strings = ['the', 'one']

for string in strings:


match = re.search(string, text)
if match:
print('Found "{}" in "{}"'.format(string, text))
text_pos = match.span()
print(text[match.start():match.end()])
else:
print('Did not find "{}"'.format(string))

For this example, we import the re module and create a simple string. Then
we create a list of two strings that we’ll search for in the main string. Next we
loop over the strings we plan to search for and actually run a search for them.
If there’s a match, we print it out. Otherwise we tell the user that the string
was not found.

There are a couple of other functions worth explaining in this example. You
will notice that we call span. This gives us the beginning and ending positions
of the string that matched. If you print out the text_pos that we assigned the
span to, you’ll get a tuple like this: (21, 24). Alternatively, you can just call
some match methods, which is what we do next. We use start and end to grab
the starting and ending position of the match, which should also be the two
numbers that we get from span.

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