strange behavior of parenthesis in python regex

Question

I\'m writing a python regex that looks through a text document for quoted strings (quotes of airline pilots recorded from blackboxes). I started by trying to write a regex with

Answer 1

You aren't capturing anything except for the quotes, which is what Python is returning.

If you add another group, things work much better:

for quote, match in re.finditer(r'("|\')(.*?)\1', page):
  print match

I prefixed your string literal with an r to make it a raw string, which is useful when you need to use a ton of backslashes (\\1 becomes \1).