🔍 search() vs findall() vs finditer()

🧠 Three ways Regex looks inside text

Think of regex like a detective 🔎 searching inside a paragraph.

🟥 1️⃣ re.search() → Find FIRST match only

🧠 Think like

“Mujhe pehla match dikhao, bas!”

✨ Syntax

re.search(pattern, text)

📦 Returns

• ✔ Match object

• ❌ None if not found

🧪 Example

text = "Price ₹999, Discount ₹100"
m = re.search(r"₹\d+", text)

📤 Result

₹999

🔍 Access data

m.group()

✅ Best Use Case

• You need only one value

• Product ID

• First price

• First email

🧠 Fast & simple

🟦 2️⃣ re.findall() → Find ALL matches (List)

🧠 Think like

“Mujhe sab kuch chahiye 😄”

✨ Syntax

re.findall(pattern, text)

📦 Returns

• ✔ List of matches

• ✔ Empty list [] if nothing found

🧪 Example

text = "₹999 ₹1499 ₹1999"
prices = re.findall(r"₹\d+", text)

📤 Result

['₹999', '₹1499', '₹1999']

⚠️ Important Behavior

If capturing groups exist ( ), only group content is returned:

re.findall(r"₹(\d+)", text)

Result:

['999', '1499', '1999']

✅ Best Use Case

• Multiple prices

• All emails

• All phone numbers

• Review counts

🧠 Most used in scraping

🟩 3️⃣ re.finditer() → Iterator of match objects (PRO MODE 🚀)

🧠 Think like

“Sab matches chahiye, details ke saath”

✨ Syntax

re.finditer(pattern, text)

📦 Returns

• ✔ Iterator of match objects

• ✔ Memory efficient

🧪 Example

text = "₹999 ₹1499"
for m in re.finditer(r"₹\d+", text):
    print(m.group(), m.start(), m.end())

📤 Output

₹999 0 4
₹1499 5 10

🔍 Extra Powers

You get:

• .group()

• .start()

• .end()

• .span()

✅ Best Use Case

• Large text

• Need positions

• Advanced scraping

• NLP pipelines

🧠 Most powerful & clean

🎨 VISUAL COMPARISON TABLE

🧠 HOW TO CHOOSE? (Golden Rule)

Need one thing?      → search()
Need many values?    → findall()
Need details?        → finditer()

🧪 Flipkart Example (Real Life)

Extract product ID (single)

re.search(r"/p/(itm\w+)", url)

Extract all prices

re.findall(r"₹\d+", page_text)

Extract prices + position

re.finditer(r"₹\d+", page_text)

⚠️ COMMON BEGINNER MISTAKES

❌ Using findall() when only one value needed
❌ Forgetting groups change findall() output
❌ Ignoring None check in search()

✅ Always do:

if m:
    print(m.group())

🎯 ONE-LINE MEMORY TRICK 🧠

🔍 search → pehla
📋 findall → sab
🔁 finditer → sab + details