Practice with regular expressions

startrekreg.py

pattern = """
    \b                # new word boundary
    NCC               # Match NCC
    ( ?-? ?)          # Match '-'
    ([0-9][0-9]+)     # Match registry number
    ( ?-? ?)          # Match optional '-'
    ([A-Z]?)          # Match optional suffix
    \b                # end word boundary
"""