Comparing strings - akin to Perl's "=~"

[krumblebunk at gmail.com]

Hello gurus,

I am learning Python to take the place of Perl in my toolbox of bits
and bobs, and writing something pretty simple in theory, but having a
hard time in Python with it - I am using a 3rd party module, and I am
sure the etiquette of this channel states that this is pure Python
questions only, but please bare with me in light of this, as my
question does indeed relate to Python only.

I am grabbing the output from a SQL statement (using PyGreSQL 'pg'
module), and when it returns the result, I am pulling it out as such:

try:
    sc=pg.connect(dbname='mydb',host='dbhost',user='ppp')
except pg.InternalError:
    print "Failed to execute SQL: %s" % sql
    exit

for foo in sc.query(sql).dictresult():   <- this returns a dict of the
result
    f=dict(foo)
    for k in f.iteritems()
        if k == '^Hostname':               <-- need this sort of
behaviour - match a partial string.
        print "%s" % f[3]              <-- ..and if true, need to pull
out the 4th column on that line.

This breaks spectacularly -

any ideas?

thanks!

kb.