the whole range of Unicode whitespace characters. \S Matches any non-whitespace character; equivalent to [^\s]. \w Matches any alphanumeric character; equivalent to [a-zA-Z0-9_] in bytes patterns or string patterns with the ASCII flag. In string patterns without the ASCII flag, it will match the range of Unicode alphanumeric characters (letters plus digits plus underscore). With LOCALE, it will match the set [0-9_] plus characters defined as letters for the current locale. \W Matches the complement of \w. \\ Matches a literal backslash. This module exports the following functions: match Match a regular expression pattern to the beginning of a string. fullmatch Match a regular expression pattern to all of a string. search Search a string for the presence of a pattern. sub Substitute occurrences of a pattern found in a string. subn Same as sub, but also return the number of substitutions made. split Split a string by the occurrences of a pattern. findall Find all occurrences of a pattern in a string. finditer Return an iterator yielding a Match object for each match. compile Compile a pattern into a Pattern object. purge Clear the regular expression cache. escape Backslash all non-alphanumerics in a string. Each function other than purge and escape can take an optional 'flags' argument consisting of one or more of the following module constants, joined by "|". A, L, and U are mutually exclusive. A ASCII For string patterns, make \w, \W, \b, \B, \d, \D match the corresponding ASCII character categories (rather than the whole Unicode categories, which is the default). For bytes patterns, this flag is the only available behaviour and needn't be specified. I IGNORECASE Perform case-insensitive matching. L LOCALE Make \w, \W, \b, \B, dependent on the current locale. M MULTILINE "^" matches the beginning of lines (after a newline) as well as the string. "$" matches the end of lines (before a newline) as well as the end of the string. S DOTALL "." matches any character at all, including the newline. X VERBOSE Ignore whitespace and comments for nicer looking RE's. U UNICODE For compatibility only. Ignored for string patterns (it is the default), and forbidden for bytes patterns. This module also defines an exception 'error'. é