Delving Deeper

The subject of regular expressions is quite deep, and it takes an immense amount of practice to get used to the special character syntax. Furthermore, the re module contains a vast set of methods available for performing searches using regular expressions. Upon completing the examples in this section, you should have a much deeper appreciation for how powerful regular expressions can be.

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'