re.findall not returning full match?

Question

I have a file that includes a bunch of strings like \"size=XXX;\". I am trying python\'s re module for the first time and am a bit mystified by the following behavior: if I

Answer 1

In some cases, the non-capturing group is not appropriate, for example with regex which detects repeated words (example from python docs)

r'(\b\w+)\s+\1'

In this situation to get whole match one can use

[groups[0] for groups in re.findall(r'((\b\w+)\s+\2)', text)]

Note that \1 has changed to \2.