Python Tutorial: Finding and replacing

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/regular-expressions-in-python at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- Finally, we'll talk about different methods that allow us to search or replace substrings. Python has several built-in methods that will help you search a target string for a specified substring. The first method is dot find. As you can see in the slide, it takes the desired substring as a mandatory argument. You can specify two other arguments. An inclusive starting position and an exclusive ending position. In the example code, we search for Waldo in the string Where's Waldo?. The dot find method returns the lowest index in the string where it can find the substring, in this case, eight. If we search for Wenda, the substring is not found and the method returns minus one. Now, we check if we can find Waldo between characters number zero and five. In the code, we specify the starting position, zero, and the ending position, six, because this position is not inclusive. The dot find method will not find the substring and returns minus one as we see in the output. The dot index method is identical to dot find. In the slide, we see that it takes the desired substring as a mandatory argument. It can take optional starting and ending positions as well. In the example, we search again for Waldo using dot index. We get eight again. When we look for a substring that is not there, we have a difference. The dot index method raises an exception, as we can see in the output. We can handle this using the try-except block. In the slide, you can observe the syntax. The try part will test the given code. If any error appears the except part will be executed obtaining the following output as a result. The dot count method searches for a specified substring in the target string. It returns the number of non-overlapping occurrences. In simple words, how m