Soft-deprecating re.match()

Python 3.15 introduces re.prefixmatch() as a more explicit alias for the often-misunderstood re.match(), which only anchors at the start of a string rather than requiring a full match. Following PEP 387's soft deprecation policy, re.match() is now soft-deprecated: it remains fully supported with no removal planned and no warnings issued, but new code is encouraged to use prefixmatch() (for half-anchored matches), search() (for anywhere matches), or fullmatch() (for full matches) instead, since the name match() misleadingly suggests full matching semantics.

Source: https://hugovk.dev/blog/2026/soft-deprecating-re.match. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.