There are many ugly recipes about to handle the common use case that could
be handled by:
def findfirst(regex, text, default=None, flags=0):
return next(finditer(regex, text, flags=flags), default=default)
The matching and return value semantics would be the same as those of
*re.findall()*, but the search would stop on the first match, or return
"default" if there wasn't a match (*findfirst()* will return a tuple when
more than one group is matched).
Typically programmers will use:
matched = re.findall(regex, text)[0]
which is inefficient, and incorrect when there is no match.
Typically, the pattern for the use case will be:
m = re.search(regex, text)
if m:
matched = m.groups()
else:
matched = default
nowadays:
matched = m.groups() if (m := re.search(regex, text)) else default
The semantics of *findall()* are nicer, and so would be those of
*findfirst()*.
--
Juancarlo *Añez*
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