Do Python regexes support something like Perl's \G?

Question

I have a Perl regular expression (shown here, though understanding the whole thing isn\'t hopefully necessary to answering this question) that contains the \\G metacharacter

Answer 1

You can use re.match to match anchored patterns. re.match will only match at the beginning (position 0) of the text, or where you specify.

def match_sequence(pattern,text,pos=0):
  pat = re.compile(pattern)
  match = pat.match(text,pos)
  while match:
    yield match
    if match.end() == pos:
      break # infinite loop otherwise
    pos = match.end()
    match = pat.match(text,pos)

This will only match pattern from the given position, and any matches that follow 0 characters after.

>>> for match in match_sequence(r'[^\W\d]+|\d+',"he11o world!"):
...   print match.group()
...
he
11
o