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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.