What is (\d+)/(\d+) in regex?

Question

I know it's a Regular Expression. I have seen this particular regular expression in a piece of code. What does it do? Thanks

Answer 1

Expanding on minitech's answer:

• ( start a capture group
• \d a shorthand character class, which matches all numbers; it is the same as [0-9]
• + one or more of the expression
• ) end a capture group
• / a literal forward slash

Here is an example:

>>> import re >>> exp = re.compile('(\d+)/(\d+)') >>> foo = re.match(exp,'1234/5678') >>> foo.groups() ('1234', '5678') 

If you remove the brackets (), the expression will still match, but you'll only capture one set:

>>> foo = re.match('\d+/(\d+)','1234/5678') >>> foo.groups() ('5678',) 

Answer 2

It matches one or more digits followed by a slash followed by one or more digits.

The two "one or more digits" here also form groups, which can be extracted and used.