How do I do an "OR" for my python regex?

Question

re.compile("abc")

I would like to do "abc" OR "xyz".

Answer 1

Use |:

re.compile("abc|xyz")

It's worth perusing regular-expression.info for detailed information as well as Regular Expression HOWTO and re — Regular expression operations from the Python documentation.

Answer 2

I'll take this opportunity to point you to an excellent reference for many of life's problems: Wikipedia.

Regular Expressions on Wikipedia

You might also find answers here.

Answer 3

I'm more a perl regex guy, but the current popular answer seems to match either abcyz or abxyz. I normally would have the regex look like "(abc)|(xyz)". You want to use the parenthesis to group the 2 strings your looking for.

Answer 4

Remember the doc property inside of python. In particular, you can access it for regex by typing

import re 
re.__doc__

at the python shell or by using a python doc browser such as the one built into Spyder.

This particular question is addressed there.