I would argue that having distinct match
and search
helps readability. The difference between match('((([0-9]+-[0-9]+)|([0-9]+))[,]?)+[^,]', s)
and search('((([0-9]+-[0-9]+)|([0-9]+))[,]?)+[^,]', s)
is clear without the need for me to parse the regular expression myself. It also helps code reuse. Consider that you have PHONE_NUMBER_REGEX
defined somewhere. If you only had a method to “search” but not to “match”, you would have to do something like search(f"\A{PHONE_NUMBER_REGEX}\Z", s)
, which is error-prone and less readable. Most likely you would end up having at least two sets of precompiled regex objects (i.e. PHONE_NUMBER_REGEX
and PHONE_NUMBER_FULLMATCH_REGEX
). It is also a fairly common practice in other languages’ regex libraries (cf. [1,2]). Golang, which is usually very reserved in the number of ways to express the same thing, has 16 different matching methods[3].
Regarding re.findall
, I see what you mean, however I don’t agree with your conclusions. I think it is a useful convenience method that improves readability in many cases. I’ve found these usages from my code, and I’m quite happy that this method was available[4]:
digits = [digit_map[digit] for digit in re.findall("(?=(one|two|three|four|five|six|seven|eight|nine|[0-9]))", line)]
[(minutes, seconds)] = re.findall(r"You have (?:(\d+)m )?(\d+)s left to wait", text)
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/regex/Matcher.html
[2] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/regex
[4] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Ahades%2Faoc23 findall&type=code
Me just using LaTeX[1] with hundreds of templates[2] with no formatting problems for 18 years now…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
[2] https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/tagged/cv