Question

Can python expand what is matched by w+ and W+? How would I add more characters to its list?

Why? Going through some text and finding there are some characters I would like to add to the word definition such as & and æ.

If I cannot add to the word definition, then how do I add to my functions:

re.findall(r'\w+', txt)
re.findall(r'\W+', txt)

Answer 1

Well \w is a predefined set of characters, you can’t programatically modify the meaning of \w. But you can setup a group that will match any character in \w plus any other characters you want using the [] syntax. So you’d change your regex to

[\w\&æ]+

or

[\W\&æ]+

respectively

This matches any character in the \w or \W set and adds & and æ. You can play around with these expressions on regexpal.