Groups in regular expressions don't repeat as expected

Wed Apr 20 15:23:53 EDT 2011

On 2011年04月20日, John Nagle <nagle at animats.com> wrote:
> Here's something that surprised me about Python regular expressions.
>> >>> krex = re.compile(r"^([a-z])+$")
> >>> s = "abcdef"
> >>> ms = krex.match(s)
> >>> ms.groups()
> ('f',)
>> The parentheses indicate a capturing group within the
> regular expression, and the "+" indicates that the
> group can appear one or more times. The regular
> expression matches that way. But instead of returning
> a captured group for each character, it returns only the
> last one.
>> The documentation in fact says that, at
>> http://docs.python.org/library/re.html
>> "If a group is contained in a part of the pattern that matched multiple 
> times, the last match is returned."
>> That's kind of lame, though. I'd expect that there would be some way
> to retrieve all matches.

.findall
-- 
Neil Cerutti