EscapingMetacharacters.md

Escaping Metacharacters

Escaping Metacharacters in regular Expression

Metacharacters

• Metacharacters are characters that have special meaning within regular expressions.
• The period (.), brackets [] are some examples of metacharacters.
• To escape a special metacharacter use \ before that metacharacter.

Syntax:

pattern=r'\metacharacters'

Example normal :

#import required module
import re

#input string
input_string="a=[hi] this is simple"

# find out the text inside the []
#pattern=r'[\w+]' Wrong pattern 

pattern=r'[\w+]'
result=re.findall(pattern,input_string)
print(result)

Output:

['a', 'h', 'i', 't', 'h', 'i', 's', 'i', 's', 's', 'i', 'm', 'p', 'l', 'e']

Example Using escape metacharacters

#import required module
import re


input_string="a=[hi] this is simple"

# find out the text inside the []
#pattern=r'[\w+]' Wrong pattern 

pattern=r'\[\w+\]'
result=re.findall(pattern,input_string)
print(result)

#here [] is escaped using \  character as \[\] 

Output:

['[hi]']

Example 3:

Find out. occurrence in a given string

input_string='this is simple.python easy is a programming language.'

import re

input_string='this is simple.python easy is a programming language.'

pattern=r'\.'
result=re.findall(pattern,input_string)
print(result)

Output:

['.', '.']