Book Image

The Python Workshop - Second Edition

By : Corey Wade, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Graham Lee
4.7 (3)
Book Image

The Python Workshop - Second Edition

4.7 (3)
By: Corey Wade, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Graham Lee

Overview of this book

Python is among the most popular programming languages in the world. It’s ideal for beginners because it’s easy to read and write, and for developers, because it’s widely available with a strong support community, extensive documentation, and phenomenal libraries – both built-in and user-contributed. This project-based course has been designed by a team of expert authors to get you up and running with Python. You’ll work though engaging projects that’ll enable you to leverage your newfound Python skills efficiently in technical jobs, personal projects, and job interviews. The book will help you gain an edge in data science, web development, and software development, preparing you to tackle real-world challenges in Python and pursue advanced topics on your own. Throughout the chapters, each component has been explicitly designed to engage and stimulate different parts of the brain so that you can retain and apply what you learn in the practical context with maximum impact. By completing the course from start to finish, you’ll walk away feeling capable of tackling any real-world Python development problem.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
13
Chapter 13: The Evolution of Python – Discovering New Python Features

Using regular expressions

Regular expressions (or regexes) are a domain-specific programming language that defines a grammar for expressing efficient and flexible string comparisons. Introduced in 1951 by Stephen Cole Kleene, regular expressions have become a popular tool for searching and manipulating text. As an example, if you’re writing a text editor and you want to highlight all web links in a document and make them clickable, you might search for strings that start with HTTP or HTTPS, then those that contain ://, and then those that contain some collection of printable characters, until you stop finding printable characters (such as a space, newline, or the end of the text), and highlight everything up to the end. With standard Python syntax, this will be possible, but you will end up with a very complex loop that will be difficult to get right. Using regexes, you match against https?://\S+.

This section will not teach you the full regular expression syntax –...