Question

Which of the codes shown below results in a match?

(a) re.match(‘George(?=Washington)’, ‘George Washington’)

(b) re.match(‘George(?=Washington)’, ‘George’)

(c) re.match(‘George(?=Washington)’, ‘GeorgeWashington’)

(d) re.match(‘George(?=Washington)’, ‘Georgewashington’)

I had been asked this question in my homework.

This intriguing question originated from Regular Expressions topic in chapter Regular Expressions and Files of Python

Answer 1

Right option is (c) re.match(‘George(?=Washington)’, ‘GeorgeWashington’)

Best explanation: The code shown above demonstrates the use of the function re.match, along  with the special character ?=. This results in a match only when ‘George’ is immediately followed by ‘Washington’. Also, we have not used the module to ignore case. Hence the match is case-sensitive. Therefore the only option which results in a match is:

re.match(‘George(?=Washington)’, ‘GeorgeWashington’)