How do you translate this regular-expression idiom from Perl into Python?

Question

I switched from Perl to Python about a year ago and haven\'t looked back. There is only one idiom that I\'ve ever found I can do more easily in Perl than in Python:<

Answer 1

Expanding on the solution by Pat Notz a bit, I found it even the more elegant to:
  - name the methods the same as re provides (e.g. search() vs. check()) and
  - implement the necessary methods like group() on the holder object itself:

class Re(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.result = None

    def search(self, pattern, text):
        self.result = re.search(pattern, text)
        return self.result

    def group(self, index):
        return self.result.group(index)

---

Example

Instead of e.g. this:

m = re.search(r'set ([^ ]+) to ([^ ]+)', line)
if m:
    vars[m.group(1)] = m.group(2)
else:
    m = re.search(r'print ([^ ]+)', line)
    if m:
        print(vars[m.group(1)])
    else:
        m = re.search(r'add ([^ ]+) to ([^ ]+)', line)
        if m:
            vars[m.group(2)] += vars[m.group(1)]

One does just this:

m = Re()
...
if m.search(r'set ([^ ]+) to ([^ ]+)', line):
    vars[m.group(1)] = m.group(2)
elif m.search(r'print ([^ ]+)', line):
    print(vars[m.group(1)])
elif m.search(r'add ([^ ]+) to ([^ ]+)', line):
    vars[m.group(2)] += vars[m.group(1)]

Looks very natural in the end, does not need too many code changes when moving from Perl and avoids the problems with global state like some other solutions.