[Python-Dev] pre-PEP: Complete, Structured Regular Expression Group Matching (original) (raw)

Raymond Hettinger python at rcn.com
Fri Aug 6 16:30:10 CEST 2004

A notable limitation of the re.match method is that it fails to capture all group match information for repeatedly matched groups. For example, in a call like this ::

m0 = re.match(r'([A-Z]|[a-z])*', 'XxxxYzz') one would like to see that the group which matched four times matched the strings 'X', 'xxx', 'Y' and 'zz'.

I suspect there is a typo in the example and that the asterisk should precede the right paren:

 m0 = re.match(r'([A-Z]|[a-z]*)', 'XxxxYzz')

Raymond

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