Number of regex matches

Question

I\'m using the finditer function in the re module to match some things and everything is working.

Now I need to find out how many matches

Answer 1

If you find you need to stick with finditer(), you can simply use a counter while you iterate through the iterator.

Example:

>>> from re import *
>>> pattern = compile(r'.ython')
>>> string = 'i like python jython and dython (whatever that is)'
>>> iterator = finditer(pattern, string)
>>> count = 0
>>> for match in iterator:
        count +=1
>>> count
3

If you need the features of finditer() (not matching to overlapping instances), use this method.