re Questions

[Blake Adams]

On Sunday, January 26, 2014 12:06:59 PM UTC-5, Larry.... at gmail.com wrote:
> 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~_')

Got it that makes sense.  Thanks for the quick reply Larry