re.search() only matches the first occurrence

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Re.search only matches the first occurrence within the string. You want finditer or findall.

re.search

Scan through string looking for the first location where the regular expression pattern produces a match, and return a corresponding MatchObject instance. Return None if no position in the string matches the pattern; note that this is different from finding a zero-length match at some point in the string.

Finditer returns match objects for all locations within the target string, yielding an iterator, while findall returns the substrings for all matches.

>>> import re
>>> re.findall('a', 'ababababa')
['a', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'a']

>>> x = list(re.finditer('a', 'ababababa'))
>>> x
[<_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(0, 1), match="a">,
 <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(2, 3), match="a">,
 <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(4, 5), match="a">,
 <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(6, 7), match="a">,
 <_sre.SRE_Match object; span=(8, 9), match="a">]
>>> x[0].group()
'a'

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