python - regex search and findall

Question

I need to find all matches in a string for a given regex. I\'ve been using findall() to do that until I came across a case where it wasn\'t doing what I expecte

Answer 1

@aleph_null's answer correctly explains what's causing your problem, but I think I have a better solution. Use this regex:

regex = re.compile(r'\d+(?:,\d+)*')

Some reasons why it's better:

1. (?:...) is a non-capturing group, so you only get the one result for each match.

2. \d+(?:,\d+)* is a better regex, more efficient and less likely to return false positives.

3. You should always use Python's raw strings for regexes if possible; you're less likely to be surprised by regex escape sequences (like \b for word boundary) being interpreted as string-literal escape sequences (like \b for backspace).