CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonstring
Júlio César
Júlio César

Reputation: 95

Detect pattern in a string in python

I need to be able to detect patterns in a string in Python. For example:

xx/xx/xx (where x is an integer).

How could I do this?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4749

Answers (2)

user6525960
user6525960

Reputation:

This is a case for regular expressions. The best resource to start out that I have read so far would be from a book called "Automate The boring Stuff with Python.

This is just a sample of how you migth implement regular expressions to solve your problem. 

import re

regex = re.compile(r'\d\d\/\d\d/\d\d$')
mo = regex.findall("This is a test01/02/20")

print(mo)

and here is the output 

['01/02/20']

Imports python's library to deal with regex(es) import re

Then you ceate a regex object with: 

regex = re.compile(r'\d\d\/\d\d/\d\d')

This migth look scary but it's actually very straight forward. Youre defining a pattern. In this case the pattern is \d\d or two digits, followed by / then two more and so on.

Here is a good link to learn more

https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html

Thou I defenetly suggest picking up the book.

Upvotes: 0

jasonbcox
jasonbcox

Reputation: 121

Assuming you want to match more than just dates, you'll want to look into using Regular Expressions (also called Regex). Here is the link for the re Python doc: https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html This will tell you all of the special character sequences that you can use to build your regex matcher. If you're new to regex matching, then I suggest taking a look at some tutorials, for example: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_reg_expressions.htm

Upvotes: 1

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