Question

Is a regular expression the correct way of going about this?

I have a list of strings (Big Ape, Big Bird, Small Bird, Small Ape, Medium Ape, Silver Ape, Blue Ape, Black Ape) if I enter ‘Big’ the regular expression should return (Big Ape, Big Bird), if I enter ‘al’ the the list that is returned is ‘Small Bird, Small Ape). Is this possible, kind of context search with regular expressions?

Answer 1

This is easy, but RE’s are more powerful than you need for simple substring matching.

Here is an example in python

import re   ### regular expression library

possibilities = ['Big Ape', 'Big Bird', 'Small Bird', 'Small Ape',
                 'Medium Ape', 'Silver Ape', 'Blue Ape', 'Black Ape']

def search(list, pattern):
    output = []
    for item in list:
       match = re.search(pattern, item)
       if match:
           output.append(item)
    return output

The output:

>>> search(possibilities, 'Big')
['Big Ape', 'Big Bird']

>>> search(possibilities, 'al')
['Small Bird', 'Small Ape']