Python, for all its power and popularity, has long lacked a form of flow control found in other languages—a way to take a value and match it elegantly against one of a number of possible conditions.

I have a string ... Python assumes decimal and creates a number that's much, much bigger (in the above example, it would return the # 101101 instead of 45). I tried the binascii.a2b_uu(string ...

A full-blown programming language like Java or Python can do many things, but regex does one thing only: match text against patterns ... for the string data:, followed by one to any number ...

So, we’ve got a switch statement with slightly different syntax, right? Not quite. The name match was used for a reason — what’s actually going on here is something called Pattern Matching.