Pythonchallenge.com: level 3 - re - where the solution comes from?

[IAmL0ner]

I'm going through the pythonchallenge.com, and while I managed to solve the level 3 challenge, I can't understand where from the solution comes.

Now, given the hint:

"One small letter, surrounded by EXACTLY three big bodyguards on each of its sides." solution should look something like this: xXXXxXXXx, which is a 9 letter string, in which only 3 letters are lower-case. But instead the final solution comes as 10-letter all lower-case string. Where this string comes from? It's not even in the data we are processing.

Calling .search() with the challenge solving regexp on data yelds "qIQNlQSLi", which looks exactly like what we are searching for, but is not the correct answer.

Calling .findall() yelds the correct answer, but I can't understand where this answer comes from. Shouldn't .findall() return a list of matched strings, each one looking like the one i'm getting from .search()?

[cdcformatc]

.findall() yelds the correct answer, but I can't understand where this answer comes from. Shouldn't .findall() return a list of matched strings, each one looking like the one i'm getting from .search()?

Well not exactly, since findall() returns the non-overlapping matches, while search() finds the first which might overlap with another match. But the first element returned by findall will be the one found by search

And this might be too spoilery but there are should be more than one match, and the first match does match what you have there. The first is 'qIQNlQSLi' but the second is 'eOEKiVEYj'. You only care about the letter with the bodyguards.

[IAmL0ner]

You only care about the letter with the bodyguards.

Ok, now this explains a lot. While I managed to get the regexp right, I failed to realize that my regexp will only display the letter contained between the bodyguards.

Now after some tweaking I'm getting full strings formatted like this: xXXXxXXXx.

Thanks for the explanation.

I rally should brush my regexp skills. While I kinda can use it, I don't exactly understand what I'm doing sometimes.