Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
import re
str="Everyone loves Stack Overflow"
print(re.findall("[ESO][^.]",str))
I don’t understand why [^.] does anything. I thought it only matches characters that are not characters – in other words: nothing! But the output is the following:
['Ev', 'St', 'Ov']
Can someone shed some light on this? It’s impossible to search for something like [^.] on google, and pythondocs about regular expressions didn’t help either.
Most of the regular expression special characters lose their special meaning within a character class (square brackets), so while
.matches any character,[.]matches a literal.and[^.]matches any character other than.. You will sometimes see people wrap a character like.in square brackets just to make sure it’s treated literally without having to worry about any corner cases in a regular expression library.