Match First Sequence in Regular Expression?

[Alex Martelli]

Tim Chase <python.list at tim.thechases.com> wrote:
   ...
> I'm not quite sure what your intent here is, as the
> resulting find would obviously be "aaa", of length 3.

But that would also match 'aaaa'; I think he wants negative loobehind
and lookahead assertions around the 'aaa' part.  But then there's the
spec about matching only if the sequence is the first occurrence of
'a's, so maybe he wants '$[^a]*' instead of the lookbehind (and maybe
parentheses around the 'aaa' to somehow 'match' is specially?).

It's definitely not very clear what exactly the intent is, no...


Alex