Question regarding re module

[Tomohiro Kusumi]

Hi,

I have a question regarding re module.
# By the way I'm not in this list, so I'm sorry but please CC me.

I tried following code in Python shell using a regular expression.
Why doesn't the result of dir(reg) have 'pattern', 'flags', and
'groupindex' although they exist as members of _sre.SRE_Pattern
instance ?

It sort of irritates me, because whenever I write Python code
using a module which I'm not used to using, I often try Python
shell with TAB complete to find out the member of module/instance.

Tomohiro Kusumi

-------------------------------------------------
Python 2.5 (r25:51908, May 16 2008, 13:41:55)
[GCC 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-14)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import re
>>> reg = re.compile(r"[0-9]+")
>>> reg.pattern
'[0-9]+'
>>> reg.flags
0
>>> reg.groupindex
{}
>>> dir(reg)
['__copy__', '__deepcopy__', 'findall', 'finditer', 'match', 'scanner',
'search', 'split', 'sub', 'subn']
>>> reg.<TAB>
reg.__copy__      reg.finditer      reg.search        reg.subn
reg.__deepcopy__  reg.match         reg.split
reg.findall       reg.scanner       reg.sub