pyparsing: parseString confusion

[Peter Fein]

My understanding of parseString seems flawed: I thought the grammar must
match the string in its entirety, based on the following from the howto:

"scanString allows you to scan through the input source string for
random matches, instead of exhaustively defining the grammar for the
entire source text (as would be required with parseString)"

However:
>>> from pyparsing import *
>>> alphas
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
>>> word=Word(alphas)
>>> word.parseString("foo888")
(['foo'], {})

I'd expect this to raise an exception.  What am I missing here?

-- 
Peter Fein                 pfein at pobox.com                 773-575-0694

Basically, if you're not a utopianist, you're a schmuck. -J. Feldman