On Thu, 05 Nov 2015 11:54:20 +1100, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote:
>On Thu, 5 Nov 2015 10:02 am, Seymore4Head wrote: > >> So far the only use I have for regex is to replace slicing, but I >> think it is an improvement. > >I don't understand this. This is like saying "so far the only use I have for >a sandwich press is to replace my coffee pot". Regular expressions and >slicing do very different things. > >Slicing extracts substrings, given known starting and ending positions: > > >py> the_str = "Now is the time for all good men..." >py> the_str[7:12] >'the t' > > >Regular expressions don't extract substrings with known start/end positions. >They *find* matching text, giving a search string with metacharacters. (If >there are no metacharacters in your search string, you shouldn't use a >regex. str.find will be significantly faster and more convenient.) > >Slicing is not about finding text, it is about extracting text once you've >already found it. So they are complementary, not alternatives. Here is an example of the text we are slicing apart. >From stephen.marqu...@uct.ac.za Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008 Return-Path: <postmas...@collab.sakaiproject.org> Received: from murder (mail.umich.edu [141.211.14.90]) by frankenstein.mail.umich.edu (Cyrus v2.3.8) with LMTPA; Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:14:16 -0500 X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.3 Received: from murder ([unix socket]) by mail.umich.edu (Cyrus v2.2.12) with LMTPA; Sat, 05 Jan 2008 09:14:16 -0500 Received: from holes.mr.itd.umich.edu (holes.mr.itd.umich.edu [141.211.14.79]) by flawless.mail.umich.edu () with ESMTP id m05EEFR1013674; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:14:15 -0500 Received: FROM paploo.uhi.ac.uk (app1.prod.collab.uhi.ac.uk [194.35.219.184]) BY holes.mr.itd.umich.edu ID 477F90B0.2DB2F.12494 ; 5 Jan 2008 09:14:10 -0500 Received: from paploo.uhi.ac.uk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by paploo.uhi.ac.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F919BC2F2; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 14:10:05 +0000 (GMT) Message-ID: <200801051412.m05eciah010...@nakamura.uits.iupui.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Received: from prod.collab.uhi.ac.uk ([194.35.219.182]) by paploo.uhi.ac.uk (JAMES SMTP Server 2.1.3) with SMTP ID 899 for <sou...@collab.sakaiproject.org>; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 14:09:50 +0000 (GMT) Received: from nakamura.uits.iupui.edu (nakamura.uits.iupui.edu [134.68.220.122]) by shmi.uhi.ac.uk (Postfix) with ESMTP id A215243002 for <sou...@collab.sakaiproject.org>; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 14:13:33 +0000 (GMT) Received: from nakamura.uits.iupui.edu (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by nakamura.uits.iupui.edu (8.12.11.20060308/8.12.11) with ESMTP id m05ECJVp010329 for <sou...@collab.sakaiproject.org>; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:12:19 -0500 Received: (from apache@localhost) by nakamura.uits.iupui.edu (8.12.11.20060308/8.12.11/Submit) id m05ECIaH010327 for sou...@collab.sakaiproject.org; Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:12:18 -0500 Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 09:12:18 -0500 X-Authentication-Warning: nakamura.uits.iupui.edu: apache set sender to stephen.marqu...@uct.ac.za using -f To: sou...@collab.sakaiproject.org From: stephen.marqu...@uct.ac.za The practice problems are something like pull out all the email addresses or pull out the days of the week and give the most common. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list