Question about metacharacter '*'

[rxjwg98 at gmail.com]

Hi,

I just begin to learn Python. I do not see the usefulness of '*' in its
description below:




The first metacharacter for repeating things that we'll look at is *. * doesn't
match the literal character *; instead, it specifies that the previous character
can be matched zero or more times, instead of exactly once.

For example, ca*t will match ct (0 a characters), cat (1 a), caaat (3 a
characters), and so forth. 



It has to be used with other search constraints?


Thanks,