Does this regex mean it has to start with A, end with Z? re.search "\A[0-9A-Za-z_-]+\Z"

Question

Does this regex mean it has to start with A, end with Z?

re.search("\A[0-9A-Za-z_-]+\Z", sometext)

Answer 1

No, those are anchors.

\A means start of string, and \Z means end of string. Similarly ^ means start of line and $ means end of line.

See the documentation for the re module.

\A - Matches only at the start of the string.
\Z - Matches only at the end of the string.