Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Comments on Why does my regex "match" at the beginning of the string, but not at the end?
Parent
Why does my regex "match" at the beginning of the string, but not at the end?
My impression is that the regexps behave a little bit odd:
>>> import re
>>> r=re.compile("test")
>>> r.match("test")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 4), match='test'>
>>> r.match("1test")
>>> r.match("test2")
<re.Match object; span=(0, 4), match='test'>
>>> r.match("1test2")
>>>
I also tried using python-pcre and got the same results.
The regex is just an ordinary word, so I think this should behave like a substring match, or perhaps a full-line match. But it seems to match lines starting with "test", but not lines that have "test" somewhere else.
Why?
Post
The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| peterh | (no comment) | Jun 4, 2025 at 13:24 |
The documentation for re.match(...) is explicit that it only matches at position 0.
If you're asking this question, what you probably want is re.search(...) to match at any point within the string.
1 comment thread
1 comment thread