alt Hacker NewsSometimes I wish regexes were full matches by default and required prefixing and postfixing with `.*` to get the current behaviour
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ruined • 01/16/2026
a match isn't boolean, it's substring. the original (and more common) use-cases would become excessively verbose
Java's Pattern.match() method works that way. Python has two separate methods: re.match auto-anchors, re.search does not.