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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Reading Files

Sahar Nasiri
Sahar Nasiri
7,454 Points
Posted by Sahar Nasiri
Sahar Nasiri
7,454 Points

What is that "Span"?

When it finds a match, it says the match with Span(). What is this?

Keith Ostertag
Keith Ostertag
16,619 Points

See this: https://docs.python.org/2/howto/regex.html for some details.

1 Answer

Anthony Albertorio
Anthony Albertorio
22,624 Points

.span() is a property that returns a tuple which contains the index range where the pattern is matched. So, if you get span=(0,4) that means that the pattern starts at index 0 to 3 (since its exclusive of 4).

You can access .span() like so: re.search(pattern, data).span().