Regular expressions

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On Thursday, November 5, 2015 at 8:12:22 AM UTC-7, Seymore4Head wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Nov 2015 11:54:20 +1100, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> >On Thu, 5 Nov 2015 10:02 am, Seymore4Head wrote:
> >> So far the only use I have for regex is to replace slicing, but I
> >> think it is an improvement.
> >
> >I don't understand this. This is like saying "so far the only use I have for
> >a sandwich press is to replace my coffee pot". Regular expressions and
> >slicing do very different things.
> >[...]
> 
> Here is an example of the text we are slicing apart.
> 
>[...email headers...]
>
> The practice problems are something like pull out all the email
> addresses or pull out the days of the week and give the most common.

Yes, that is a perfectly appropriate use of regexes.

As Steven mentioned though, the term "slicing" is also used with a 
very specific and different meaning in Python, specifically referring
to a part of a list using a syntax like "alist[a:b]".  I can't seem
to get to python.org at the moment but if you look in the Python
docs index under "slicing" you'll find more info.