CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonregexpattern-matching
EdgarJames
EdgarJames

Reputation: 55

Regular Expression [^.] in Python

import re
str="Everyone loves Stack Overflow"
print(re.findall("[ESO][^.]",str))

I don't understand why [^.] does anything. I thought it only matches characters that are not characters - in other words: nothing! But the output is the following:

['Ev', 'St', 'Ov']

Can someone shed some light on this? It's impossible to search for something like [^.] on google, and pythondocs about regular expressions didn't help either.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 179

Answers (3)

svick
svick

Reputation: 244807

Most characters lose their special meaning when they are inside a character group.

So . matches any character, but [.] matches only dot. Thus [^.] matches everything that is not dot.

Upvotes: 3

mhyfritz
mhyfritz

Reputation: 8522

Character classes [] have their own little language. Specifically, the dot . inside a character class matches the actual . (and is not a wildcard).

Upvotes: 4

geekosaur
geekosaur

Reputation: 61379

Most of the regular expression special characters lose their special meaning within a character class (square brackets), so while . matches any character, [.] matches a literal . and [^.] matches any character other than .. You will sometimes see people wrap a character like . in square brackets just to make sure it's treated literally without having to worry about any corner cases in a regular expression library.

Upvotes: 15

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