Regular expression to match a #

[John Machin]

Devan L wrote:
> John Machin wrote:
> 
>>Aahz wrote:
>>
>>>In article <42fb45d7$1 at news.eftel.com>,
>>>John Machin  <sjmachin at lexicon.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Search for r'^something' can never be better/faster than match for
>>>>r'something', and with a dopey implementation of search [which Python's
>>>>re is NOT] it could be much worse. So please don't tell newbies to
>>>>search for r'^something'.
>>>
>>>
>>>You're somehow getting mixed up in thinking that "^" is some kind of
>>>"not" operator -- it's the start of line anchor in this context.
>>
>>I can't imagine where you got that idea from.
>>
>>If I change "[which Python's re is NOT]" to "[Python's re's search() is
>>not dopey]", does that help you?
>>
>>The point was made in a context where the OP appeared to be reading a
>>line at a time and parsing it, and re.compile(r'something').match()
>>would do the job; re.compile(r'^something').search() will do the job too
>>-- BECAUSE ^ means start of line anchor -- but somewhat redundantly, and
>>very inefficiently in the failing case with dopey implementations of
>>search() (which apply match() at offsets 0, 1, 2, .....).
> 
> 
> I don't see much difference.

and I didn't expect that you would -- like I wrote above: "Python's re's 
search() is not dopey".