Python- how do I use re to match a whole string [duplicate]

Answer 1

if you look for pretty pythonic writings, go for isalpha and isdecimal :

str = u"23443434";
print str.isdecimal();

Answer 2

use boundaries in your regex + raw string to encode the regex, like this:

r"^[a-zA-Z]+$"

Answer 3

You might consider using isalpha() on the string. It returns true if the string contains nothing but alphabetic characters, false otherwise.

if aString.isalpha():
   do something
else:
   handle input error

Answer 4

Anchor it to the start and end, and match one or more characters:

if re.match("^[a-zA-Z]+$", aString):

Here ^ anchors to the start of the string, $ to the end, and + makes sure you match 1 or more characters.

You'd be better off just using str.isalpha() instead though. No need to reach for the hefty regular expression hammer here:

>>> 'foobar'.isalpha()
True
>>> 'foobar42'.isalpha()
False
>>> ''.isalpha()
False