Question

class MyTest:

    a = re.compile('abc')

    def testthis(self, fname):
        print fname
        if self.a.match(fname):
            return 'yes'
        else:
            return 'no'

If I pass 'testabc' to testthis() then it prints no. If I change the regex to .*abc then it prints yes. What’s going on? Is it trying to match against the whole string?

Answer 1

From the docs (emphasis mine):

re.match(pattern, string[, flags])

If zero or more characters at the beginning of string match the regular expression pattern, return a corresponding MatchObject instance. Return None if the string does not match the pattern; note that this is different from a zero-length match.

Perhaps you wanted .search() instead.