Regex Python Get Printable Characters

Introduction to Regex in Python

When working with strings in Python, you may need to extract only the printable characters. This can be achieved using regular expressions, also known as regex. Regex is a powerful tool that allows you to search, validate, and extract patterns from strings. In this article, we will explore how to use regex in Python to get printable characters.

The first step is to understand what printable characters are. Printable characters are all the characters that can be printed, excluding non-printable characters such as newline, tab, and carriage return. In regex, you can use the following pattern to match printable characters: [ -~]. This pattern matches any character that is a space or any character that is a printable ASCII character.

Extracting Printable Characters with Regex

Python has a built-in module called re that provides support for regular expressions. You can use the re module to search, validate, and extract patterns from strings. To extract printable characters using regex, you can use the findall function from the re module. The findall function returns all non-overlapping matches of the pattern in the string as a list of strings.

Here is an example of how to use regex to extract printable characters from a string: import re; string = 'Hello World'; printable_chars = re.findall('[ -~]', string); print(printable_chars). This code will output: ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 'W', 'o', 'r', 'l', 'd']. As you can see, the non-printable character is excluded from the output.