Why won't re.groups() give me anything for my one correctly-matched group?

Question

When I run this code:

print re.search(r'1', '1').groups() 

I get a result of (). However, .group(0) gives me the match.

Shouldn't groups() give me something containing the match?

Answer 1

groups is empty since you do not have any capturing groups - http://docs.python.org/library/re.html#re.MatchObject.groups. group(0) will always returns the whole text that was matched regardless of if it was captured in a group or not

Edited.