Question

Which of the following lines of code will not show a match?

(a) >>> re.match(‘ab*’, ‘a’)

(b) >>> re.match(‘ab*’, ‘ab’)

(c) >>> re.match(‘ab*’, ‘abb’)

(d) >>> re.match(‘ab*’, ‘ba’)

This question was addressed to me in an international level competition.

I would like to ask this question from Regular Expressions topic in section Regular Expressions and Files of Python

Answer 1

The correct choice is (d) >>> re.match(‘ab*’, ‘ba’)

Explanation: In the code shown above, ab* will match to ‘a’ or ‘ab’ or ‘a’ followed by any number of b’s. Hence the only line of code from the above options which does not result in a match is:

>>> re.match(‘ab*’, ‘ba’).