Precompiled patterns

suggest change
import re

precompiled_pattern = re.compile(r"(\d+)")
matches = precompiled_pattern.search("The answer is 41!")
matches.group(1)
# Out: 41

matches = precompiled_pattern.search("Or was it 42?")
matches.group(1)
# Out: 42

Compiling a pattern allows it to be reused later on in a program. However, note that Python caches recently-used expressions (docs, SO answer), so “programs that use only a few regular expressions at a time needn’t worry about compiling regular expressions”.

import re

precompiled_pattern = re.compile(r"(.*\d+)")
matches = precompiled_pattern.match("The answer is 41!")
print(matches.group(1))
# Out: The answer is 41

matches = precompiled_pattern.match("Or was it 42?")
print(matches.group(1))
# Out: Or was it 42

It can be used with re.match().

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Regular Expressions:
* Precompiled patterns
* Flags

Table Of Contents
2 Filter
3 List
7 Loops
22 Reduce
27 Classes
31 Set
37 Regular Expressions
42 Tuple
45 Enum
62 Sockets
89 urllib
92 Idioms
104 Stack
105 Profiling
109 Logging
111 os module
118 Mixins
120 ArcPy
126 Arrays
132 2to3 tool
135 Unicode
138 Neo4j
140 Curses
141 Templates
145 heapq
146 tkinter
154 Audio
155 pyglet
157 ijson
160 Flask
161 Groupby
163 pygame
165 hashlib
166 Gzip
167 ctypes
185 pyaudio
186 shelve