andrew cooke <and...@acooke.org> wrote:
> Please can someone explain why the following fails:
>
> from re import compile
>
> p = compile(r'\bword\b')
> m = p.match(' word ')
> assert m
>
> My understanding is that \b matches a space at the start or end of a
> word, and that "word" is a word - http://docs.python.org/library/re.html
>
> What am I missing here? I suspect I am doing something very stupid.
>
You misunderstand what \b does: it doesn't match a space, it matches a 0
length string on a boundary between a non-word and a word.
Try:
p.match(' word ', 1).group(0)
and you'll see that you are only match the word, not the surrounding
puctuation.
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