> I am a fussy learner. Could someone explain to me why the following > inconsistency exists between methods? How can it be justified if it is > considered all right?
It's the standard way of accessing groups from regex matches in pretty much all languages that support them. In most modern languages, I believe regexes are generally designed to be compatible with Perl regexes - but these I guess derive from earlier languages like awk and sed. So it's not an inconsistency. Think of 0 as being an implicit group around the entire expression. In addition, if the match around the entire group was only accessible via a different method, then how would you refer to the entire match in back-references/substitutions? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
