checking a string against multiple patterns

[Jonathan Gardner]

On Dec 18, 4:41 am, tomasz <tmkm... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Is there an alternative to it? Am I missing something? Python doesn't
> have special variables $1, $2 (right?) so you must assign the result
> of a match to a variable, to be able to access the groups.
>
> I'd appreciate any hints.
>

Don't use regexes for something as simple as this. Try find().

Most of the time I use regexes in perl (90%+) I am doing something
that can be done much better using the string methods and some simple
operations. Plus, it turns out to be faster than perl usually.