May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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Lab No. 11
Lab 05 – Introduction to Regular Expression

Objectives:

 Introduction to Regular Expression

 Metacharacters
 Functions in regular expressions

1. Introduction to Regular Expression

A RegEx, or Regular Expression, is a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern. RegEx
can be used to check if a string contains the specified search pattern. We use RegEx Module
Python has a built-in package called re, which can be used to work with Regular Expressions. So
you need to import library re before you can use regular expressions in Python.

Regular expressions use two types of characters:

a) Meta characters: As the name suggests, these characters have a special meaning, similar to * in
wild card.
b) Literals (like a,b,1,2…)

The most common uses of regular expressions are:

 Search a string (search and match)

 Finding a string (findall)
 Break string into a sub strings (split)
 Replace part of a string (sub)

2. What are various methods of Regular Expressions?

The ‘re’ package provides multiple methods to perform queries on an input string. Here are the
most commonly used methods:

1. re.match()
2. re.search()
3. re.findall()
4. re.split()
5. re.sub()
6. re.compile

Prepared By: Syed Faisal Ali CS-121 | Object Oriented Programming 1

 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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3. Metacharacters

Metacharacters are characters that are interpreted in a special way by a RegEx engine. Here's a list of
metacharacters:

[] . ^ $ * + ? {} () \ |
Character Description Example

1. [] A set of characters "[a-m]"

2. \ Signals a special sequence (can also be used to escape special characters)
"\d"
3. . Any character (except newline character) "he..o"
4. ^ Starts with "^hello"
5. $ Ends with "world$"
6. * Zero or more occurrences "aix*"
7. + One or more occurrences "aix+"
8. {} Exactly the specified number of occurrences "al{2}"
9. | Either or "falls|stays"
10. () Capture and group

You can also specify a range of characters using - inside square brackets.

[a-e] is the same as [abcde].

[1-4] is the same as [1234].
[0-39] is the same as [01239].

Regular Expression(RE) Syntax

import re

Example of w+ and ^ Expression

"^": This expression matches the start of a string

"w+": This expression matches the alphanumeric character in the string

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 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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1. re.search()
Function will search the regular expression pattern and return the first occurrence. the
pattern is found and “null” if the pattern is not found

In order to use search() function, you need to import re first and then execute the code.
The search() function takes the "pattern" and "text" to scan from our main string

"^": This expression matches the start of a string

"w+": This expression matches the alphanumeric character in the string
Exercise 1: Write a program search the
import re

string = "Python is fun"

# check if 'Python' is at the beginning

match = re.search('^Python', string)

if match:
print("pattern found inside the string")
else:
print("pattern not found")
Output:

2.The findall() function:

The findall() function returns a list containing all matches.

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 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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Exercise 2: Write a code that will able to extract ou from all the words in the string.

import re
str = " The rain in Spain"
x = re.findall("Sp", str)
print(x)

Output:

The list contains the matches in the order they are found. If no matches are found, an empty list
is returned.

Exercise 3:

\d - Matches any decimal digit. Equivalent to [0-9]

# Program to extract numbers from a string

import re

string = 'hello 12 hi 89. Howdy 34'

pattern = '\d+'

result = re.findall(pattern, string)

print(result)

Output:

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 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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4. re.split()

The re.split method splits the string where there is a match and returns a list of strings
where the splits have occurred.
If there is more than one match, only the first occurrence of the match will be returned:

Exercise 4:

import re

string = 'Twelve:12 Eighty nine:89.'

pattern = '\d+'

result = re.split(pattern, string)

print(result)

Output:

5. The sub() Function:

The sub() function replaces the matches with the text of your choice:

The syntax of re.sub() is:

re.sub(pattern, replace, string)

The method returns a string where matched occurrences are replaced with the content of
replace variable

Exercise 6:
# Program to remove all whitespaces
import re

# multiline string
string = 'abc 12\
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 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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de 23 \n f45 6'

# matches all whitespace characters

pattern = '\s+'

# empty string
replace = ''

new_string = re.sub(pattern, replace, string)

print(new_string)
.

Output:

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 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

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Programming Exercise (Python)

Task1:
You are working in Data Science project in which you need to find the mobile networks in
certain area.

Wireless Provides Access Codes

Mobilink 030 0300, 0301, 0302, 0303, 0304, 0305, 0306, 0307,
0308, 0309, 03000
Zong 031 0310, 0311, 0312, 0313, 0314, 0315
Warid 032 0320, 0321, 0322, 0323, 0324, 0325
Ufone 033 033, 0331, 0332, 0333, 0334, 0335, 0336, 0337
Telenor 034 0340, 0341, 0342, 0343, 0344, 0345, 0346, 0347
SCOM 035 0355 (AJK & Gilgit- Baltistan)
Instaphone 036 0364

For this your task is to enter at least 10 mobile numbers in a file of different companies based on
list provided to you. Extract the mobile numers such as 0332 is for Ufone, then at the end of the
list calculate each mobile network in total. The required output will be:

Mobile Number Network Count

O3323328094 Ufone 1
.
.
.

After 10 entries
The total will be

Ufone Users :4
Jazz Users 3
Telenor Users 2
Warid Users 1

Total Users : 10

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 May 15, 2019 Lab 09 – Introduction to Regular Expression

Student Name: Roll No: Section:

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