Regular Expressions are like the Wild West of string manipulation. They're the lawless, untamed frontier of text processing. Where the rules are made up, and everyone's a little bit of a cowboy.
Or so we thought.
You should care because, well, you probably have some text lying around somewhere. And if you're lucky, it's probably not just a bunch of gibberish. Maybe it's even, you know, actual text.
But seriously, regular expressions are useful for parsing, validating, and manipulating text. They're like the swiss army knife of text processing.
The basic syntax for regular expressions in Python is, well, not exactly rocket science. It's just a few simple concepts: ^, $, \*, +, ?, [ and ]. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, partner.
For example, let's say you want to match the word "foo". You can do it like this: ^foo$. Easy peasy, right?
But what about matching multiple words? That's where things get a little wilder. You can use ^foo|bar$ to match either "foo" or "bar".
And if you want to match a word that's followed by some other stuff, you can use ^foo.*$.
And so on, and so forth.
Want to learn more? Check out our subpage on groups!
Or our subpage on character classes!
Or, heck, why not just go wild! with some examples?