Puzzled about this regex

[Chris Rebert]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 7:17 PM, Jean-Claude Neveu
<jcn-france1972 at pobox.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I wonder if someone could tell me where I am going wrong with my regular
> expression, please. My regex only matches the text I'm looking for (a number
> followed by a distance unit) when it appears at the beginning of the string.
> But I am not using the ^ character (which would indicate that I only want a
> match if it is at the start).

Reading the fine manual, http://docs.python.org/library/re.html :

re.match(pattern, string[, flags])
    If zero or more characters at the beginning of string match the
regular expression pattern, return a corresponding MatchObject
instance. Return None if the string does not match the pattern; note
that this is different from a zero-length match.
    ***Note: If you want to locate a match anywhere in string, use
search() instead.***

re.search(pattern, string[, flags])
    Scan through string looking for a location where the regular
expression pattern produces a match, and return a corresponding
MatchObject instance. Return None if no position in the string matches
the pattern; note that this is different from finding a zero-length
match at some point in the string.

Cheers,
Chris
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