About the Book

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Book details

Scripting and automation tasks often need to extract particular portions of text from input data or modify them from one format to another.

This book will help you learn Python Regular Expressions, a mini-programming language for all sorts of text processing needs.

The book heavily leans on examples to present features of regular expressions one by one. It is recommended that you manually type each example and experiment with them.

Both the standard re module and the popular third-party regex module are covered in this book.

Exercises are also included to test your understanding.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with programming basics. You should also have a working knowledge of Python syntax and features like string formats, string methods and list comprehensions.

You are also expected to get comfortable with reading manuals, searching online, visiting external links provided for further reading, tinkering with illustrated examples, asking for help when you are stuck and so on. In other words, be proactive and curious instead of just consuming the content passively.

If you have prior experience with a programming language but not Python, see my curated list of learning resources before starting this book.

Testimonials

I love your books on regex...As a student from the Digital VLSI space, it is indeed useful now and definitely in the future. It's really well written and really easy to understand the examples — feedback on reddit

GitHub repo

Visit https://github.com/learnbyexample/py_regular_expressions for markdown source, example files, exercise solutions and other details related to the book.

Interactive exercises

Based on the book contents as well as the exercises, I made an interactive TUI app with 100+ questions covering both the builtin re module and the third-partyregex module. These exercises will test your understanding of anchors, alternation, grouping, escaping metacharacters, dot metacharacter, quantifiers, character class, lookarounds, flags, etc.

Feedback and Errata

I would highly appreciate if you'd let me know how you felt about this ebook. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors. You can reach me via:

• Issue Manager: https://github.com/learnbyexample/py_regular_expressions/issues
• E-mail: learnbyexample.net@gmail.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/learn_byexample

About the Author

Sundeep Agarwal

@learn_byexample

Sundeep Agarwal is a lazy being who prefers to work just enough to support his modest lifestyle. He accumulated vast wealth working as a Design Engineer at Analog Devices and retired from the corporate world at the ripe age of twenty-eight. Unfortunately, he squandered his savings within a few years and had to scramble trying to earn a living. Against all odds, selling programming ebooks saved his lazy self from having to look for a job again. He can now afford all the fantasy ebooks he wants to read and spends unhealthy amount of time browsing the internet.

When the creative muse strikes, he can be found working on yet another programming ebook (which invariably ends up having at least one example with regular expressions). Researching materials for his ebooks and everyday social media usage drowned his bookmarks, so he maintains curated resource lists for sanity sake. He is thankful for free learning resources and open source tools. His own contributions can be found at https://github.com/learnbyexample.