Python Regex - What does the single quote do? Example: [^"]*-CodePudding

I am new to Regex and also python. I am trying to parse out a link in some HTML, and ran across the solution [^"]*

For example:

import re
pattern = '''[^"]*'''
matcher = re.compile(pattern)
matches = matcher.search('https://www.yelp.com/adredir?ad_business_id=PX_xyQcEj1bnaec2oMwH2')
print(matches.group())

This pattern successfully matches the link, is it because it saying anything between the single quote in the string is a match? In what case would you use [^']* instead of [^'']* ?

CodePudding user response：

[^"]* just says "get every character that does not start with " till one " has been found". * represents "at least zero times". I recommend this tutorial and this playground.

Example Code:

import re
pattern = '''[^"]*'''
matcher = re.compile(pattern)
matches = matcher.search(
    'https://www.yelp.com/adredir?ad_business_id=PX_xyQcEj1bnaec2oMwH2"asd')
print(matches.group())

This outputs:

https://www.yelp.com/adredir?ad_business_id=PX_xyQcEj1bnaec2oMwH2

CodePudding user response：

"*" - means "0 or more instances of the preceding regex token"