[StavrosK]

Yep, I just came here to post that:

In [2]: re.search("b[l].e", "babel")

In [3]: re.search("b[l].e", "blabber") Out[3]: <_sre.SRE_Match at 0x7f2db79ed030>

It looks like they meant "match" as in "re.match", i.e. "^b[l].*e$", which is not the usual definition of the word.

[ibdknox]

That would also make this question specific to python, which wasn't at all what I was thinking about. It's a question about regular expressions, it should be as agnostic as possible to implementation.

[StavrosK]

Yeah, agreed, although there are different RE flavors, so you can't get too agnostic.