On 26/11/2013 22:31, Alex Seewald wrote:
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?
Well, including 'span' in the name would be confusing because it already has a .span method which returns the start and end indexes. I think that for newcomers to regexes, the concept of capture groups is one of the easiest things to understand!