Metacharacters

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Published Jun 10, 2022Updated Sep 5, 2023
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In regex, certain metacharacters are used to match and qualify regular character patterns or other expressions.

Common Metacharacters

Metacharacter Description Example
. Matches any character. r'.' matches “[email protected]“.
[] Matches character class inside the brackets not excluded by ^. r'Char[mander|meleon|izard]' matches “Charmander“, “Charmeleon“, and “Charizard.”
^ Matches characters at the beginning of a string. r'^C' matches “Codecademy.”
$ Matches characters at the end of a string. r'y$' matches “Codecademy.”

Quantifiers

Some metacharacters are concerned with the frequency of certain character patterns as shown in the table below:

Metacharacter Description Example
? Matches zero or one of the preceding character. r'neighbo?ur' matches “neighbor” and “neighbour.”
* Matches zero or more of the preceding character. r're*d' matches “red” and “reed.”
+ Matches one or more of the preceding character. r'tw+o' matches “two” but not “to.”
| Matches either the pattern before or after the |. r'true|false' matches “true“ or “false.”
{x} Matches if the preceding character occurred x times in a row. r're{2}d' matches “reed” (2 “e”s) but not “red” (only 1 “e”).

Capture Groups

Capture groups can be used to check and quantify different patterns in the string. This can be done with parentheses (...), as shown in the example below:

import re


pattern_one = 'red'
pattern_two = 'rad'
pattern_three = 'rid'


capture_group = r'r(e|a)d'


print(re.match(capture_group, pattern_one))
print(re.match(capture_group, pattern_two))
print(re.match(capture_group, pattern_three))

The capture group uses the pipe | quantifier to match two out of the three patterns since they both have “e” or an “a”. The following output will be printed:

<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 3), match='red'>
<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 3), match='rad'>
None

Special Sequences

The backslash \ metacharacter has two primary uses:

  • It matches a character literal that would otherwise have meaning (e.g. ^ or $).
  • It finds a match within particular character classes or sequences, such as digits.

The table below describes these special metacharacters when used with the \ backslash:

Metacharacter Description Example
\A Only matches the beginning of a string. r'\AC' matches “Codecademy” but not “codecademy.”
\b Matches the boundary at the beginning or end of a string. r'\bCode\b' matches “Code Ninja” but not “CodeNinja.”
\B Matches the boundary within a string. r'Code\B' matches “CodeNinja” but not Code Ninja.”
\d Matches any digit character (0-9) in a string. r'\d square' matches “4 square” but not “four square.”
\D Matches any non-digit character in a string. '\D square' matches “four square” but not “4 square”.
\s Matches any whitespace character including tabs and line breaks. r'Code\sNinja' matches “Code Ninja” but not “CodeNinja.”
\S Matches any non-whitespace character. r'Code Ninja\S' matches “Code Ninjas“ but not “Code Ninja.”
\w Matches most word characters including numbers and the underscore. r'\w' matches everything in “code_ninja.txt” except for the period ..
\W Matches any non-word character. r'\W' only matches the period . in “code_ninja.txt.”
\Z Only matches the end of a string. r'emy\Z' matches “Codecademy“ but not “CODECADEMY.”

Codebyte Example

The following snippet can be used for practicing with regex metacharacters:

Code
Output
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