remove sensitive information such as social security or credit card numbers find common typos such as multiple spaces between wordsaccidentally accidentally repeated wordsor multiple exclamation marks at the end of sentences those are annoying!summary while computer can search for text quicklyit must be told precisely what to look for regular expressions allow you to specify the pattern of characters you are looking forrather than the exact text itself in factsome word processing and spreadsheet applications provide find-and-replace features that allow you to search using regular expressions the re module that comes with python lets you compile regex objects these objects have several methodssearch(to find single matchfindall(to find all matching instancesand sub(to do find-and-replace substitution of text you can find out more in the official python documentation at docs python org/ /library/re html another useful resource is the tutorial website practice questions what is the function that creates regex objectswhy are raw strings often used when creating regex objectswhat does the search(method returnhow do you get the actual strings that match the pattern from match object in the regex created from '(\ \ \ )-(\ \ \ -\ \ \ \ )'what does group covergroup group parentheses and periods have specific meanings in regular expression syntax how would you specify that you want regex to match actual parentheses and period characters the findall(method returns list of strings or list of tuples of strings what makes it return one or the other what does the character signify in regular expressions what two things does the character signify in regular expressions what is the difference between the and characters in regular expressions what is the difference between { and { , in regular expressions what do the \ \wand \ shorthand character classes signify in regular expressions