New submission from Raymond Hettinger:
Experience teaching Python has shown that people have a hard time learning to
work with match objects. A contributing cause is the opaque repr:
>>> import re
>>> s = 'On 3/14/2013, Python celebrate Pi day.'
>>> mo = re.search(r'\d+/\d+/\d+', s)
>>> mo
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x100456100>
They could explore the match object with dir() and help() and the matchobject
methods and attributes:
>>> dir(mo)
['__class__', '__copy__', '__deepcopy__', ...
'end', 'endpos', 'expand', 'group', ... ]
>>> mo.start()
3
>>> mo.end()
12
>>> mo.group(0)
'3/14/2013'
However, this gets old when experimenting with alternative regular expressions.
A better solution is to improve the repr:
>>> re.search(r'\d+/\d+/\d+', s)
<SRE Match object: start=3, stop=12, group(0)='3/14/2013'>
This would make the regular expression module much easier to work with.
----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 180999
nosy: rhettinger
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Improve the repr for regular expression match objects
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.4
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Python tracker <[email protected]>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue17087>
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