Question

I was wondering if any of the following exist in python:

• A: non-regex equivalent of “re.findall()”.
• B: a way of neutralizing regex special characters in a variable before passing to findall().

I am passing a variable to re.findall which runs into problems when the variable has a period or a slash or a carat etc because I would like these characters to be interpreted literally. I realize it is not necessary to use regex to do this job, but I like the behavior of re.findall() because it returns a list of every match it finds. This allows me to easily count how many times the substring exists by using len().

Here’s an example of my code:

>>substring_matches = re.findall(randomVariableOfCharacters, document_to_be_searched)
>>
>>#^^ will return something like ['you', 'you', 'you']
>>#but could also return something like ['end.', 'end.', 'ends']
>>#if my variable is 'end.' because "." is a wildcard.
>>#I would rather it return ['end.', 'end.']
>>
>>occurrences_of_substring = len(substring_matches)

I’m hoping to not have to use string.find(), if possible. Any help and/or advice is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use str.count() if you only want the number of occurances, but its not equivalent to re.findall() it only gets the count.

document_to_be_searched = "blabla bla bla."
numOfOcur = document_to_be_searched.count("bl")