Regular Expressions: Grouping and the Pipe Character
The | character is called a pipe. We can use it anywhere we want to match one of many expressions.
Example: The regular expression r’Batman|Tina Fey’ will match either ‘Batman’ or ‘Tina Fey’. When both Batman and Tina Fey occur in the searched string, the first occurrence of matching text will be returned as the Match object.
Python3
# Python program to illustrate # Matching regex objects # with multiple Groups with the Pipe import re heroRegex = re.compile (r'Batman|Tina Fey') mo1 = heroRegex.search('Batman and Tina Fey.') print(mo1.group()) |
Output:
'Batman'
Pattern matching in Python with Regex
You may be familiar with searching for text by pressing ctrl-F and typing in the words you’re looking for. Regular expressions go one step further: They allow you to specify a pattern of text to search for. In this article, we will see how pattern matching in Python works with Regex.