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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Word Length

Posted by Victor Gavojdea
Victor Gavojdea
11,796 Points

Not sure what to put as the search pattern, nothing I'm trying seems to be working.

I'm sure its obvious but I'm stumped. Looking at solutions on stackoverflow involving [a-zA-Z] is just confusing me more.

1 Answer

Chris Freeman
MOD
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 Points
Chris Freeman
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,441 Points

The challenge asks "return a list of the words in the string that are 'count' word characters long or longer". In a regular expression search a word character is represented with \w. To find count many characters, you can multiply this short string by count. Then to also find words of greater length, you can search for \w* which means "zero or more word characters". putting these together you get:

import re

​def find_words(count, string):
    return re.findall(r'\w' * count + '\w*', string)
Victor Gavojdea
Victor Gavojdea
11,796 Points

Thank you. :)

Ivan Bodnar
Ivan Bodnar
2,419 Points
Ivan Bodnar
Ivan Bodnar
2,419 Points

Thanks Chris, I was stuck too, I was trying to do it with .format()