All 3 of these regex's should match, but in practice only m2 does.  Found deep in the bowels of debugging a larger problem.


import re

mainProjectsPath = '/groups/larvalolympiad/larvalolympiad/Projects/'

m1 = re.match('larvalolympiad',mainProjectsPath)
m2 = re.match('.*larvalolympiad.*',mainProjectsPath)
m3 = re.match('/larvalolympiad/',mainProjectsPath)

print(m1)
print(m2)
print(m3)

re.match requires a match at the beginning of the string. From the docs: "If zero or more characters at the beginning of string match the regular expression pattern, ...".

If you switch to re.search, they'll all match:

>>> re.search('larvalolympiad',mainProjectsPath)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xffed54f0>

>>> re.match('.*larvalolympiad.*',mainProjectsPath)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xffed5870>

>>> re.search('/larvalolympiad/',mainProjectsPath)
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xffed54f0>

Sorry, this was dumb.  Thanks for your patience.

On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Eric V. Smith <report@bugs.python.org>wrote:

>
> Eric V. Smith added the comment:
>
> re.match requires a match at the beginning of the string. From the docs:
> "If zero or more characters at the beginning of string match the regular
> expression pattern, ...".
>
> If you switch to re.search, they'll all match:
>
> >>> re.search('larvalolympiad',mainProjectsPath)
> <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xffed54f0>
>
> >>> re.match('.*larvalolympiad.*',mainProjectsPath)
> <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xffed5870>
>
> >>> re.search('/larvalolympiad/',mainProjectsPath)
> <_sre.SRE_Match object at 0xffed54f0>
>
> ----------
> nosy: +eric.smith
>
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> <http://bugs.python.org/issue20810>
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