[New-bugs-announce] [issue42353] Proposal: re.prefixmatch method (alias for re.match)

[Gregory P. Smith]

New submission from Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org>:

A well known anti-pattern in Python is use of re.match when you meant to use re.search.

re.fullmatch was added in 3.4 via https://bugs.python.org/issue16203 for similar reasons.

re.prefixmatch would be similar: we want the re.match behavior, but want the code to be obvious about its intent.  This documents the implicit ^ in the name.

The goal would be to allow linters to ultimately flag re.match as the anti-pattern when in 3.10+ mode.  Asking people to use re.prefixmatch or re.search instead.

This would help avoid bugs where people mean re.search but write re.match.

The implementation is trivial.

This is **not** a decision to deprecate the widely used in 25 years worth of code's re.match name.  That'd be painful and is unlikely to be worth doing without spreading it over a 8+ year timeline.

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 380928
nosy: gregory.p.smith
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: Proposal: re.prefixmatch method (alias for re.match)
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.10

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue42353>
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