Question

Special sequences (character classes) in Python RegEx are escapes like \w or \d that matches a set of characters.

In my case, I need to be able to match all alpha-numerical characters except numbers.

That is, \w minus \d.

I need to use the special sequence \w because I’m dealing with non-ASCII characters and need to match symbols like “Æ” and “Ø”.

One would think I could use this expression: [\w^\d] but it doesn’t seem to match anything and I’m not sure why.

So in short, how can I mix (add/subtract) special sequences in Python Regular Expressions?

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EDIT: I accidentally used [\W^\d] instead of [\w^\d]. The latter does indeed match something, including parentheses and commas which are not alpha-numerical characters as far as I’m concerned.

Answer 1

You can use r"[^\W\d]", ie. invert the union of non-alphanumerics and numbers.