[Python-ideas] re.match(pattern, string, require=True)

Hey, I bet this has been discussed before but I couldn't find it. I'd appreciate it if anyone could point me to that thread. I'm sick of seeing "AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'foo'" whenever there's a `re.match` operation that fails while the code expects it to succeed. What do you think about a flag `require` such that `re.match(pattern, string, require=True)` would either return a match or raise an exception with an actually useful message? Thanks, Ram.