regular expressions help

[David]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 18:41, Pradeep Patra <smilesonisamal at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 19, 2019, Pradeep Patra <smilesonisamal at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 19, 2019, David <bouncingcats at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 17:51, Pradeep Patra <smilesonisamal at gmail.com> wrote:

>>> > pattern=re.compile(r'^my\-dog$')
>>> > matches = re.search(mystr)

>>> > In the above example both cases(match/not match) the matches returns "None"

>>> Hi, do you know what the '^' character does in your pattern?

>> Beginning of the string. But I tried removing that as well and it still could not find it. When I tested at www.regex101.com and it matched successfully whereas I may be wrong. Could you please help here?

> I am using python 2.7.6 but I also tried on python 3.7.3.

$ python2
Python 2.7.13 (default, Sep 26 2018, 18:42:22)
[GCC 6.3.0 20170516] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import re
>>> mystr= "where is my-dog"
>>> pattern=re.compile(r'my-dog$')
>>> matches = re.search(mystr)  # this is syntax error, but it is what you showed above
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: search() takes at least 2 arguments (1 given)
>>> matches = re.search(pattern, mystr)
>>> matches.group(0)
'my-dog'
>>>