In this chapter you learned about:

• What regular expressions are

• Which meta-characters can be used in regular expressions

• How to use regular expressions in Python, using the re module

• Compiling regular expressions with re.compile()

• What match objects are

• Searching for patterns using match(), search(), findall(), and finditer()

• Replacing patterns using the sub() method

• Using square brackets in regular expressions to represent different possibilities for characters

• Using special sequences in regular expressions, many of which use the backslash character

• Repeating sub-patterns in regular expressions using repetition operators

• Grouping of sub-patterns using parentheses

• Using groups to unravel results

• Referencing within patterns

• Smugly referring people with pattern mining problems to regular expressions