re Questions

[Larry Martell]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Blake Adams <blakesadams at gmail.com> wrote:
> Im pretty new to Python and understand most of the basics of Python re but am stumped by a unexpected matching dynamics.
>
> If I want to set up a match replicating the '\w' pattern I would assume that would be done with '[A-z0-9_]'.  However, when I run the following:
>
> re.findall('[A-z0-9_]','^;z %C\@0~_') it matches ['^', 'z', 'C', '\\', '0', '_'].  I would expect the match to be ['z', 'C', '0', '_'].
>
> Why does this happen?

Because the characters \ ] ^ and _ are between Z and a in the ASCII
character set.

You need to do this:

re.findall('[A-Za-z0-9_]','^;z %C\@0~_')