Exactly, Now this will work as long as there are no wildcards in the pattern. Thus, only with fixed strings. But if you have a fixed string, there is really no need to use regex, as it will complicate you life for no real reason (as opposed to simple string methods).
With a more complex pattern (like 'a.a': match any character between two 'a' characters) this will get the length, but not what character is between the a's. To actually do that you will need to iterate through the string and apply the pattern match (which matches only the beginning of a string) to a indexed subset of the original (see example in the last post) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
