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Showing content from https://www.tutorialspoint.com/python/python_re_compile_method.htm below:

Python re.compile() method

The Python re.compile() method is used to compile a regular expression pattern into a regular expression object. This regular expression object can then be used to perform match operations more efficiently as the pattern is only compiled once.

This method takes a string representing the regular expression pattern and optional flags that modify the pattern's behavior such as re.IGNORECASE for case-insensitive matching.

Using re.compile() is beneficial when the same pattern needs to be used multiple times as it avoids the overhead of re-compiling the pattern each time a match operation is performed.

Following is the syntax and parameters of Python re.compile() method −

re.compile(pattern, flags=0)

The below are the parameters of the python re.compile() method −

• pattern: The element to be added to the set. This can be any hashable type such as numbers, strings or tuples.
• flags(optional): A set of flags used to modify the regex behavior. The flags such as re.IGNORECASE, re.MULTILINE.

This method returns compiled regular expression object.

Following is the basic example of python re.compile method.Here the pattern '\d+' which matches one or more digits is compiled and then the match method is used to find the pattern at the beginning of the string −

import re

pattern = re.compile(r'\d+')
match = pattern.match('123abc')
if match:
    print(match.group())  

123

Here in this example we specified re.IGNORECASE flag in the re.compile() method which is used to make the pattern case-insensitive −

import re

pattern = re.compile(r'hello', re.IGNORECASE)
match = pattern.match('Hello world')
if match:
    print(match.group())  

Hello

This example combinely uses more than one flag in the re.compile() method −

import re

pattern = re.compile(r'^\d+', re.MULTILINE | re.IGNORECASE)
text = """123abc
456def
789ghi"""
matches = pattern.findall(text)
print(matches)  

['123', '456', '789']

Here this example uses the re.VERBOSE flag which allows us to write more readable regular expressions with comments and whitespace −

import re

pattern = re.compile(r"""
    \d+     # One or more digits
    \s*     # Zero or more whitespace characters
    """, re.VERBOSE)
matches = pattern.findall('123    abc 456 def')
print(matches)  

['123    ', '456 ']

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