Python Learning : Metacharacters

Something fun I’ve been learning about in learning Python is using Metacharacters with Regular Expressions. To summarize regular expressions, they allow us to manipulate all types of strings for things such as substituting a word or to verify strings to match a specific pattern for things such as logins.

Metacharacters are what allow us to make our regular expressions much more efficient. Along with regular expressions they are important to remember for when learning Django with Python. The main ones I will go over are dot, caret, and dollar.

Dot (.) is a metacharacter used to substitute for a letter or number when using the regular expressions like search, find, and replace. A good example would be to use it when looking for both “grey” and “gray” as such.

This allows us to search for both “grey” and “grey” or anything in between like “grpy”.

Caret (^) and the Dollar ($) work in a similar fashion of specifying what we are looking for. Caret specifies the beginning of a string while Dollar specifies the end of strings. It should look as such when specifying the beginning end. This is also used to ensure it is not a repeated pattern that matches.

These are the three so far covered and in the next post I’ll talk about the star metacharacter as well as more on Regular Expressions.