create a variable named contacts that is an re.search

Thank you Chris, When do i get to use the (^) caret?

The caret is used to anchor the pattern to the beginning of the line. The current pattern could have also filled in with match anything from the beginning of the line:

contacts = re.search(r''' #<-- Wrap in multiline quote. Remove leading caret (^)
    ^.*  #<-- match Beginning if line followed by anything
    (?P<email>[-\w\d.+]+@[-\w\d.]+) 
     ,\s
     (?P<phone>\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4})''' #<-- Add closing paren. Remove extra backslashes. Remove trailing $
     , string, re.X | re.M) #<-- Add verbose (for multiline quote), and multiline (for muliple lines in string) flags

Is there any way you can better clarify when the ^ and $ are needed and when it is not. I am unable to follow the post below.

When developing a regular expression, you are defining pattern that is compared to a string or portion of the string to find a match. In a very simple sense, think of aligning the pattern starting at each character of the string checking for a match. The pattern is shifted one character at a time rechecking for a match in each case.

The special characters of caret (^) and dollar sign ($) represent specific alignment instructions for the pattern.

The caret indicates the pattern comparison must start at the first character of the searched string (or the beginning of the line and a multi-line string). The dollar sign indicates the pattern comparison must end at the last character of the searched string (or the end of the line in a multi-line string). These special characters can be thought of as anchors to tie the pattern to a specific position.

There are many reasons to choose to use these anchoring characters:

• If your search pattern may match multiple places within a string, an anchor can help it find the first or last match occurrence.

• Using both caret and $ you can force your pattern to consume the entire searched string.

• Using an anchor can improve performance of your regex by reducing the amount of back traces done during pattern matching.

I'm sure there are others I've left off.

The caret and dollar sign are only used if your regex pattern is required to include the start or end of the searched string or line in a muli-line sting.

I am confused that why in the pattern for email there are "-" in both [], it's necessary for email, right? but I still don't know why....

The hyphen character is valid in usernames and in domain names so it needs to be included. In regex, a hyphen is also used in specifying a range of characters, like 0-9. To include a literal hyphen as a matching character, it needs to be listed first when in a character set so it's not confusing as part of a range.

Keep in mind the challenge is using simplified domain names. The full regex check for a valid domain name is very complicated.

Packages such as Django have built-in URL validators.

Hi Chris,

I had the same solution as this except for phone number I had: ([\d]{3}-[\d]{3}-[\d]{4})

how come this didn't work?

Timothy Tseng, I’ve added the character set notation and it also works. Perhaps there is some other error. Could you include your full code?

Did you include the group name P<phone>?

The pattern will only match text exactly. So the “,\s” allows for matching the comma-space and content surrounding it, but since the additional pattern is outside of a group it won’t be captured.