a common wish for SRE is a variant of findall that returns all match objects, instead of the strings. recently, I realized that the internal scanner type (originally added to speed up Python versions of findall/sub/split) can be wrapped in an iterator, allowing the user to loop over all matches.

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import re p = re.compile(somepattern) for match in iter(p.scanner(somestring).search, None): print match.groups()

how about adding a "finditer" method, which takes care of the low-level setup:

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for match in p.finditer(somestring): print match.groups()

or should we just make the scanner factory an official part of the SRE interface? </F>