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Sahar Nasiri
7,454 PointsWhat is the role of r here?
When I remove the r in the line below I get the same result! And another question is, if we don't use raw string what should we do instead?(in this example) print(re.search(r'(\d\d\d) \d\d\d-\d\d\d', data))
1 Answer
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,423 PointsThe r prefix says to not interpret a backslash and the following character as a single escape character, but to instead interpret them as two raw characters. In the case of the "\d" for a regex "digit", it does not collide with any of the standard string escapes. So raw or not, the phone number search string behaves the same.
However, if the "\b" was used, it would mean a "word boundary" in a raw string, but get interpreted as the "BELL" in a regular unicode string.