Python first()

Python prides itself on being a newbie-friendly language; its developers have gone out of their way to try to ensure that easy tasks are straightforward to program. A recent discussion on the python-ideas mailing list looked at a use case that is common, but often implemented in an inefficient, incorrect fashion, with an eye toward making it easier to do correctly. Finding the first match for a regular expression in a body of text is where the conversation started, but it went in some other interesting directions as well.

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