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Asked: 2026-06-15T18:28:00+00:00

I’m following a tutorial about regular expression. I’m getting an error when doing the

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I’m following a tutorial about regular expression. I’m getting an error when doing the following: 

regex = r'(+|-)?\d*\.?\d*'

Apparently, Python doesn’t like (+|-). What could be the problem?
Also, what could be the issue with not adding r ahead of the regex?

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  1. Editorial Team

    You need to escape + in regular expressions to get a literal +, because it usually means “one or more instances of something”:

    regex = r'(\+|-)?\d*\.?\d*'

    And r makes it a “raw” string. Without the r, the regular expression escape sequences will be interpreted as string escape sequences, and they’ll cause all sorts of problems. (\b being a backspace instead of a word boundary, and that kind of thing.)

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