Named Groups and Backreferences

Named Groups

While numbered groups are useful, keeping track of group numbers can become difficult in complex regular expressions. Named groups allow you to assign a specific name to a capturing group, making your patterns more readable and your code easier to maintain.

Syntax

To create a named group, use the syntax (?P<name>...), where name is the identifier you want to use.

Accessing Groups with groupdict()

The match object provides a groupdict() method that returns a dictionary containing all named subgroups of the match, keyed by the group name. This is particularly useful for converting parsed data directly into a dictionary structure.