[Tutor] Regular Expressions - who's not working, them or me?!

[Barnaby Scott]

I'm sure I know the answer to the question in the
subject - me!

However I am completely stuck and cannot understand
why some REs I wrote are not finding matches. They
only seem to work at the beginning of the string.
Help!

Here is my little test script:

import re

teststr = 'a bunch of text to look in'
afewres = ['.+', 'a', '[a-z]*', 'b', '.\Z', 'o{2}',
'.$']

print 'Looking in "%s"\n' % teststr

for r in afewres:
    p = re.compile(r)
    m = p.match(teststr)
    if m:
        print 'Match for "%s": ' % r, m.group(0)
    else:
        print 'No match for "%s"' % r


And here is my output:

>>> 
Looking in "a bunch of text to look in"

Match for ".+":  a bunch of text to look in
Match for "a":  a
Match for "[a-z]*":  a
No match for "b"
No match for ".\Z"
No match for "o{2}"
No match for ".$"
>>> 

But I was expecting:

Match for ".+":  a bunch of text to look in
Match for "a":  a
Match for "[a-z]*":  a
Match for "b": b
Match for ".\Z": n
Match for "o{2}": oo
Match for ".$": n

Can anyone see why I'm not getting what I expected?
Apologies if this exposes a lamentable lack of
understanding - I am trying to learn!

Thanks

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now
http://companion.yahoo.com/