Where is _sre.SRE_Match?

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Feb 8, 2018 at 4:15 AM, Peng Yu <pengyu.ut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I see _sre.SRE_Match is returned by re.match. But I don't find where
> it is defined. Does anybody know how to get its help page within
> python command line? Thanks.
>
>>>> import re
>>>> m = re.match('a', 'abc')
>>>> print type(m)
> <type '_sre.SRE_Match'>
>>>> _sre.SRE_Match
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> NameError: name '_sre' is not defined
>

You can "import _sre" if you want access to that module, but the
leading underscore is a strong indication that this isn't something
you should be looking at - it's an implementation detail.

Python 3 makes this type public:

>>> import re
>>> re.match('a', 'abc')
<re.Match object; span=(0, 1), match='a'>
>>> re.Match
<class 're.Match'>

So if you truly need to examine this type, I suggest switching to a
newer Python.

ChrisA