Itse1359-1810-preface to text processing

Table of contents

• Preface
• String operations
• Regular expressions
• Miscellaneous

Preface

This module is one in a collection of modules on Python designed for teaching ITSE 1359 Introduction to Scripting Languages: Python at Austin Community College in Austin, TX.

The learning resource for the Text Processing portion of the course consistsof material from selected websites plus modules containing review questions and answers keyed tothe material on those websites.

The Text Processing portion of the course consists of two main areas of study:

• String operations
• Regular expressions

A list of selected websites plus review questions keyed to those websites is provided for each area of study. Thecombined list of selected websites is:

• The Python Standard Library: 6.1. string -- Common string operations
• The Python Standard Library: 6.2. re -- Regular expression operations
• The Python Standard Library: 2. Built-in Functions
• Python Library Reference -- 4.2.5 Match Objects
• Regular Expression HOWTO
• Charming Python: Text processing in Python
• tutorialspoint -- Python Strings
• tutorialspoint -- Python Regular Expressions
• Python Course -- Python 3 Tutorial -- Regular Expressions
• Python Course -- Python 3 Tutorial -- Advanced Regular Expressions
• Python Course -- Python 3 Tutorial -- Lambda, filter, reduce and map
• Python Notes (0.14.0) 9. The regular expression module

Take-home programming assignments may be based on any material on these websites as well as material from any of the other modules in this collection of modulesfor teaching ITSE 1359. However, online tests for the Text Processing portion of the course will be restricted to topics addressed in the following two modules:

• Itse1359-1830-String Operations
• Itse1359-1850-Regular Expressions

String operations

The topics covered by the module titled Itse1359-1830-String Operations concentrates mainly on the various capabilities that Python offers formanipulating strings exclusive of the use of regular expressions. For example, this includes but is not limited to:

• typical indexing and slicing operations
• iterating on a string as a sequence using a for loop
• the in operator
• triple quoted strings
• raw strings
• strings in text files
• string methods

Regular expressions

According to Wikipedia ,

In theoretical computer science and formal language theory, a regular expression (abbreviated regex or regexp) and sometimes called a rational expression is a sequence of characters that forms a search pattern,mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching, i.e. "find and replace"-like operations.

The topic of regular expressions in Python is complex with two main threads:

1. How do you create a combination of characters that form a search pattern to accomplish a given objective?
2. Given such a search pattern , how to you use the Python programming language to carry out the search?

Creating the search pattern is pretty much the same no matter what programming language you are using. The character combinations used for creatingthe necessary search patterns are very similar from one programming language to the next. Since this is a course in Python programming and is not a course inregular expression search patterns, only the simple search patterns highlighted in the module titled Itse1359-1850-Regular Expressions will be included on tests. (However there will be no such restriction on take-home assignments.)

The main thrust of the Text Processing portion of this course insofar as regular expressions is concerned, will be on Item 2 above -- learning how to use the Python programming language to implement theeffective use of regular expression search patterns.

Miscellaneous

This section contains a variety of miscellaneous information.

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