📩 Regex Day 2: Words, Boundaries and Emails

Welcome back to Pandas Daily! Your daily 5-minute boost to becoming confident in Python.

Yesterday we kicked off our journey on regex - a worldwide tool used to match patterns in text.

After nailing phone numbers, today we will push further to extract real text patterns - like emails or person's name. This is the same trick recruiters use to scan resumes and grab contacts in seconds.

🚀 w+ to find all words

w represents single character; + means one or more

  In:

    import re

    text = "Regex makes text easy!"

    print(re.findall(r"\w+", text))

  Out:
  ['Regex', 'makes', 'text', 'easy']

🚧 \b for word boundary - pattern must be a separate word

🥶 Brain freeze: pattern 'cat' when searched in text gives output from 'cat' and not 'concatenate'

  In:

    text = "I love my cat but not concatenate"

    pattern = r"\bcat\b"

    print(re.findall(pattern, text))

  Out:
  ['cat']

🚫 \B does opposite of \b - picks 'cat' only if its not a complete word

  In:

    text = "I love my cat"

    pattern = r"\Bcat\B"

    print(re.findall(pattern, text))

  Out:
  []

Lets double check

  In:

    text = "I love my concatenate" # What does this sentence mean, lol

    pattern = r"\Bcat\B"

    print(re.findall(pattern, text))

  Out:
  ['cat']

💪 Words starting with capital letters

[A-Z] ➜ first letter must be any capital alphabet
[a-z]+ ➜ followed by one or more lowercase letters

  In:

    text = "Alice and Bob went to New York"

    pattern = r"\b[A-Z][a-z]+\b"

    print(re.findall(pattern, text))

  Out:
  ['Alice', 'Bob', 'New', 'York']

⛏️ Extract Emails

[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+ ➜ Before @ - letters, numbers, dots or underscores
@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+ ➜ After @ - domain name (letters, numbers, dots, hyphen)
.[A-Za-z]{2,} ➜ After dot(.) - minimum 2 letters (.com, .org etc)

  In:

    text = "Contact us: [support@mail.com](mailto:support@mail.com) or sales@company.org"

    pattern = r"[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,}"

    print(re.findall(pattern, text))

  Out:
  ['support@mail.com', 'sales@company.org']

Want to 👉 Verify if its a valid email? or know if its gmail, outlook or yahoo! Then tune in tomorrow to learn more fun regex stuff..

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📩 Regex Day 2: Words, Boundaries and Emails

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