Python regular expressions - re.search() vs re.findall()

Question

For school I\'m supposed to write a Python RE script that extracts IP addresses. The regular expression I\'m using seems to work with re.search() but not with <

Answer 1

findall returns a list of matches, and from the documentation:

If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group.

So, your previous expression had one group that matched 3 times in the string where the last match was 0.

To fix your problem use: exp = "(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}"; by using the non-grouping version, there is no returned groups so the match is returned in both cases.