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Newsbrief: Mobile developers have earned over $80 billion through the Google Play Store worldwide, a figure mentioned during Google-parent Alphabet Inc’s Q4 earnings call this week. Google Play as a platform now has over 2 billion monthly active users as well.

Those snippets come from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s small update on what he describes as the “thriving” Android platform during the company’s recent Q4 earnings call.

Unfortunately he doesn’t dive into specifics on how those earnings are split category by category, so there’s no info on how this breaks down between game and non-game apps for the time being.

Rockstar Games VP of creative and co-founder Dan Houser is leaving the company.

The announcement broke by way of an SEC filing from Rockstar parent company Take Two Interactive this afternoon, with note that Houser’s final day with the company will come in March.

“After an extended break beginning in the spring of 2019, Dan Houser, Vice President, Creative at Rockstar Games, will be leaving the company,” reads that statement.

“Dan Houser’s last day will be March 11, 2020. We are extremely grateful for his contributions. Rockstar Games has built some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful game worlds, a global community of passionate fans and an incredibly talented team, which remains focused on current and future projects.

Houser, along with three others, founded Rockstar Games as a Take-Two subsidiary in 1998. The studio has gone on to release numerous successful and sometimes controversial titles in the 21 years since, with Houser landing writing credits on many of those releases.

This tutorial is all about the or | operator of Python’s re library. You can also play the tutorial video while you read:

What’s the Python Regex Or | Operator?

Given a string. Say, your goal is to find all substrings that match either the string 'iPhone' or the string 'iPad'. How can you achieve this?

The easiest way to achieve this is the Python or operator | using the regular expression pattern (iPhone|iPad).

Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> text = 'Buy now: iPhone only $399 with free iPad'

>>> re.findall('(iPhone|iPad)', text)

['iPhone', 'iPad']

You have the (salesy) text that contains both strings 'iPhone' and 'iPad'.

You use the re.findall() method. In case you don’t know it, here’s the definition from the Finxter blog article:

The re.findall(pattern, string) method finds all occurrences of the pattern in the string and returns a list of all matching substrings.

Please consult the blog article to learn everything you need to know about this fundamental Python method.

The first argument is the pattern (iPhone|iPad). It either matches the first part right in front of the or symbol |—which is iPhone—or the second part after it—which is iPad.

The second argument is the text 'Buy now: iPhone only $399 with free iPad' which you want to search for the pattern.

The result shows that there are two matching substrings in the text: 'iPhone' and 'iPad'.

Python Regex Or: Examples

Let’s study some more examples to teach you all the possible uses and border cases—one after another.

You start with the previous example:

>>> import re

>>> text = 'Buy now: iPhone only $399 with free iPad'

>>> re.findall('(iPhone|iPad)', text)

['iPhone', 'iPad']

What happens if you don’t use the parenthesis?

>>> text = 'iPhone iPhone iPhone iPadiPad'

>>> re.findall('(iPhone|iPad)', text)

['iPhone', 'iPhone', 'iPhone', 'iPad', 'iPad']

>>> re.findall('iPhone|iPad', text)

['iPhone', 'iPhone', 'iPhone', 'iPad', 'iPad']

In the second example, you just skipped the parentheses using the regex pattern iPhone|iPad rather than (iPhone|iPad). But no problem–it still works and generates the exact same output!

But what happens if you leave one side of the or operation empty?

>>> re.findall('iPhone|', text)

['iPhone', '', 'iPhone', '', 'iPhone', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '']

The output is not as strange as it seems. The or operator allows for empty operands—in which case it wants to match the non-empty string. If this is not possible, it matches the empty string (so everything will be a match).

The previous example also shows that it still tries to match the non-empty string if possible. But what if the trivial empty match is on the left side of the or operand?

>>> re.findall('|iPhone', text)

['', 'iPhone', '', '', 'iPhone', '', '', 'iPhone', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '']

This shows some subtleties of the regex engine. First of all, it still matches the non-empty string if possible! But more importantly, you can see that the regex engine matches from left to right. It first tries to match the left regex (which it does on every single position in the text). An empty string that’s already matched will not be considered anymore. Only then, it tries to match the regex on the right side of the or operator.

Think of it this way: the regex engine moves from the left to the right—one position at a time. It matches the empty string every single time. Then it moves over the empty string and in some cases, it can still match the non-empty string. Each match “consumes” a substring and cannot be matched anymore. But an empty string cannot be consumed. That’s why you see the first match is the empty string and the second match is the substring 'iPhone'.

How to Nest the Python Regex Or Operator?

Okay, you’re not easily satisfied, are you? Let’s try nesting the Python regex or operator |.

>>> text = 'xxx iii zzz iii ii xxx'

>>> re.findall('xxx|iii|zzz', text)

['xxx', 'iii', 'zzz', 'iii', 'xxx']

So you can use multiple or operators in a row. Of course, you can also use the grouping (parentheses) operator to nest an arbitrary complicated construct of or operations:

>>> re.findall('x(i|(zz|ii|(x| )))', text)

[('x', 'x', 'x'), (' ', ' ', ' '), ('x', 'x', 'x')]

But this seldomly leads to clean and readable code. And it can usually avoided easily by putting a bit of thought into your regex design.

Python Regex Or: Character Class

If you only want to match a single character out of a set of characters, the character class is a much better way of doing it:

>>> import re

>>> text = 'hello world'

>>> re.findall('[abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz]+', text)

['hello', 'world']

A shorter and more concise version would be to use the range operator within character classes:

>>> re.findall('[a-z]+', text)

['hello', 'world']

The character class is enclosed in the bracket notation [ ] and it literally means “match exactly one of the symbols in the class”. Thus, it carries the same semantics as the or operator: |. However, if you try to do something on those lines…

>>> re.findall('(a|b|c|d|e|f|g|h|i|j|k|l|m|n|o|p|q|r|s|t|u|v|w|x|y|z)+', text)

['o', 'd']

… you’ll first write much less concise code and, second, risk of getting confused by the output. The reason is that the parenthesis is the group operator—it captures the position and substring that matches the regex. Used in the findall() method, it only returns the content of the last matched group. This turns out to be the last character of the word 'hello' and the last character of the word 'world'.

How to Match the Or Character (Vertical Line ‘|’)?

So if the character '|' stands for the or character in a given regex, the question arises how to match the vertical line symbol '|' itself?

The answer is simple: escape the or character in your regular expression using the backslash. In particular, use 'A\|B' instead of 'A|B' to match the string 'A|B' itself. Here’s an example:

>>> import re

>>> re.findall('A|B', 'AAAA|BBBB')

['A', 'A', 'A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'B']

>>> re.findall('A\|B', 'AAAA|BBBB')

['A|B']

Do you really understand the outputs of this code snippet? In the first example, you’re searching for either character 'A' or character 'B'. In the second example, you’re searching for the string 'A|B' (which contains the '|' character).

Python Regex And

If there’s a Python regex “or”, there must also be an “and” operator, right?

Correct! But think about it for a moment: say, you want one regex to occur alongside another regex. In other words, you want to match regex A and regex B. So what do you do? You match regex AB.

You’ve already seen many examples of the “Python regex AND” operator—but here’s another one:

>>> import re

>>> re.findall('AB', 'AAAACAACAABAAAABAAC')

['AB', 'AB']

The simple concatenation of regex A and B already performs an implicit “and operation”.

Python Regex Not

How can you search a string for substrings that do NOT match a given pattern? In other words, what’s the “negative pattern” in Python regular expressions?

The answer is two-fold:

• If you want to match all characters except a set of specific characters, you can use the negative character class [^...].
• If you want to match all substrings except the ones that match a regex pattern, you can use the feature of negative lookahead (?!...).

Here’s an example for the negative character class:

>>> import re

>>> re.findall('[^a-m]', 'aaabbbaababmmmnoopmmaa')

['n', 'o', 'o', 'p']

And here’s an example for the negative lookahead pattern to match all “words that are not followed by words”:

>>> re.findall('[a-z]+(?![a-z]+)', 'hello world')

['hello', 'world']

The negative lookahead (?![a-z]+) doesn’t consume (match) any character. It just checks whether the pattern [a-z]+ does NOT match at a given position. The only times this happens is just before the empty space and the end of the string.

[Collection] What Are The Different Python Re Quantifiers?

The “and”, “or”, and “not” operators are not the only regular expression operators you need to understand. So what are other operators?

Next, you’ll get a quick and dirty overview of the most important regex operations and how to use them in Python. Here are the most important regex quantifiers:

Note that I gave the above operators some more meaningful names (in bold) so that you can immediately grasp the purpose of each regex. For example, the ‘^’ operator is usually denoted as the ‘caret’ operator. Those names are not descriptive so I came up with more kindergarten-like words such as the “start-of-string” operator.

We’ve already seen many examples but let’s dive into even more!

import re text = ''' Ha! let me see her: out, alas! he's cold: Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff; Life and these lips have long been separated: Death lies on her like an untimely frost Upon the sweetest flower of all the field. ''' print(re.findall('.a!', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of an arbitrary character that is

followed by the character sequence 'a!'.

['Ha!'] ''' print(re.findall('is.*and', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of the word 'is',

followed by an arbitrary number of characters

and the word 'and'.

['is settled, and'] ''' print(re.findall('her:?', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of the word 'her',

followed by zero or one occurrences of the colon ':'.

['her:', 'her', 'her'] ''' print(re.findall('her:+', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of the word 'her',

followed by one or more occurrences of the colon ':'.

['her:'] ''' print(re.findall('^Ha.*', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences where the string starts with

the character sequence 'Ha', followed by an arbitrary

number of characters except for the new-line character. Can you figure out why Python doesn't find any?

[] ''' print(re.findall('n$', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences where the new-line character 'n'

occurs at the end of the string.

['n'] ''' print(re.findall('(Life|Death)', text)) '''

Finds all occurrences of either the word 'Life' or the

word 'Death'.

['Life', 'Death'] '''

In these examples, you’ve already seen the special symbol ‘\n’ which denotes the new-line character in Python (and most other languages). There are many special characters, specifically designed for regular expressions. Next, we’ll discover the most important special symbols.

Related Re Methods

There are seven important regular expression methods which you must master:

• The re.findall(pattern, string) method returns a list of string matches. Read more in our blog tutorial.
• The re.search(pattern, string) method returns a match object of the first match. Read more in our blog tutorial.
• The re.match(pattern, string) method returns a match object if the regex matches at the beginning of the string. Read more in our blog tutorial.
• The re.fullmatch(pattern, string) method returns a match object if the regex matches the whole string. Read more in our blog tutorial.
• The re.compile(pattern) method prepares the regular expression pattern—and returns a regex object which you can use multiple times in your code. Read more in our blog tutorial.
• The re.split(pattern, string) method returns a list of strings by matching all occurrences of the pattern in the string and dividing the string along those. Read more in our blog tutorial.
• The re.sub(The re.sub(pattern, repl, string, count=0, flags=0) method returns a new string where all occurrences of the pattern in the old string are replaced by repl. Read more in our blog tutorial.

These seven methods are 80% of what you need to know to get started with Python’s regular expression functionality.

Where to Go From Here?

You’ve learned everything you need to know about the Python Regex Or Operator.

Summary:

Given a string. Say, your goal is to find all substrings that match either the string 'iPhone' or the string 'iPad'. How can you achieve this?

The easiest way to achieve this is the Python or operator | using the regular expression pattern (iPhone|iPad).

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Anything can happen when you’re streaming a video game online. You could catch a moment of pure magic, or you could capture a proud competitor falling on hard times. Or, you could see the contents of a player’s Switch screenshot gallery, and see if they’ve been playing ‘mature’ games like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3: Scarlet.

That’s precisely what happened in this Super Smash Bros. Ultimate matchup; while the challengers were setting up, one of them clicked the gallery icon on the Switch UI and presented the crowd with some scantily-clad Tecmo ladies. Ahem.

While the images were arguably PG-13 stuff, it was still amusing – as was the reaction of the assembled crowd, who wanted to see more after that initial glimpse. Tut tut.

As had been previously promised, a demo for the upcoming Persona 5 Scramble has now been released for Nintendo Switch. If you want to give the game a go before its full launch, here’s your chance.

You can access the demo by logging onto the Switch eShop with a Japanese account (if you don’t already have one, it’s not too complicated to set one up). Once you’re logged in, go down to the third tab on the left-hand side (below the one called ‘New’), and you’ll see the Persona 5 Scramble page listed.

Once you’ve clicked that, choose the bottom option on the right-hand side (the smaller of the two boxes) and you’ll be able to download the demo. Then you can choose to play it just as you would with any other game on your console, as long as you don’t mind playing in Japanese.

The demo was first announced last month alongside a new – and very flashy – trailer. The game is scheduled to launch on 20th February in Japan, although no western release has been confirmed just yet.

Are you hoping to hear of a western release date soon? Will you be trying out this demo? Let us know in the usual place.

• Patch Notes
• New Character
• New Weapon
• Two Maps, Two Halves For Ranked Mode
• Help Your Friends And Earn More Points
• Brand-New Rank Tier
• Party Restrictions
• Start Of The Season Rewards
• End Of The Season Rewards

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• Apex Legends Season 4: Start Time, Revenant, Map Changes, And What's New