Delving Deeper

Regular Expressions

Case-insensitive Matching

IGNORECASE causes literal characters and character ranges in the pattern to match both uppercase and lowercase characters.

# re_flags_ignorecase.py

import re

text = 'This is some text -- with punctuation.'
pattern = r'\bT\w+'
with_case = re.compile(pattern)
without_case = re.compile(pattern, re.IGNORECASE)

print('Text:\n  {!r}'.format(text))
print('Pattern:\n  {}'.format(pattern))
print('Case-sensitive:')
for match in with_case.findall(text):
    print('  {!r}'.format(match))
print('Case-insensitive:')
for match in without_case.findall(text):
    print('  {!r}'.format(match))

Since the pattern includes the literal T, if IGNORECASE is not set, the only match is the word This. When case is ignored, text also matches.

  $ python3 re_flags_ignorecase.py

Text:
  'This is some text -- with punctuation.'
Pattern:
  \bT\w+
Case-sensitive:
  'This'
Case-insensitive:
  'This'
  'text'