I like the idea of a better attribute for accessing the matched text. I would go for either "m.matched" or "m.text". There are convenience methods on match objects that I've almost never used: why do we need both .span() and .start()+.end(), for example? And yet, I use .group() all the time, and have to just accept that my pattern had no groups in it, and I say "group" when I mean "matched text". Yes, I understand about groups, and group 0, etc, but for such a common need, why not have a common name?For a match object, m, m.group(0) is the semantics for accessing the entire span of the match. For newcomers to regular expressions who are not familiar with the concept of a 'group', the name group(0) is counter-intuitive. A more natural-language-esque alias to group(0), perhaps 'matchSpan', could reduce the time novices spend from idea to working code. Of course, this convenience would introduce a bit of complexity to the codebase, so it may or may not be worth it to add an alias to group(0). What do people think?
>>> m = re.search("[ab]", "xay")
>>> m
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x10a2ce9f0>
_sre? SRE_Match? huh? :)--
Alex Seewald
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