Regex character “$” doesn't mean “end-of-string”

This article is about a bit of surprising behavior I recently discovered using Python's regex module (re) while developing SBOM tooling for CPython.

Folks who've worked with regular expressions before might know about ^ meaning "start-of-string" and correspondingly see $ as "end-of-string". So the pattern cat$ would match the string "lolcat" but not "internet cat video".

The behavior of ^ made me think that $ was similar, but they aren't always symmetrical and the behavior is platform-dependent. Specifically for Python with multiline mode disabled the $ character can match either the end of a string or a trailing newline before the end of a string.

So if you're trying to match a string without a newline at the end, you can't only use $ in Python! My expectation was having multiline mode disabled wouldn't have had this newline-matching behavior, but that isn't the case.

Next logical question is how does one match the end of a string without a newline in Python?

After doing more research on Python and other regular expression syntaxes I also found \z and \Z as candidates for "end-of-string" characters.

Multi-line mode is enabled with re.MULTILINE in Python, the docs have the following to say:

When re.MULTILINE is specified the pattern character '$' matches at the end of the string and at the end of each line (immediately preceding each newline). By default, '$' only matches at the end of the string and immediately before the newline (if any) at the end of the string.

Let's see how these features work together across multiple platforms:

• ✅: Pattern matches the string "cat\n"
• ❌: Pattern does not match the string "cat\n"
• ⚠️: Pattern is invalid or character not supported.

Summarizing the above table, if matching a trailing newline is acceptable then $ with multiline mode works consistently across all platforms, but if we wanted to not match a trailing newline then things get more complicated.

To not match a trailing newline, use \z on all platforms except Python and ECMAScript where you'll need to use \Z or $ without multiline mode respectively. Hope you learned something about regular expressions today!

Note: The table of data was gathered from regex101.com, I didn't test using the actual runtimes.

Thanks for reading! ♡ Did you find this article helpful and want more content like it? Get notified of new posts by subscribing to the RSS feed or the email newsletter.