Anchors aren't ignored. For re.match, `^abc$` is equivalent to `abc`, so the anchors are just redundant. (N.B. `^^abc$$` will match the same set of strings as `

Anchors aren't ignored. For re.match, `^abc$` is equivalent to `abc`, so the anchors are just redundant. (N.B. `^^abc$$` will match the same set of strings as `^abc$`.) For re.search, `^abc$` is equivalent to `re.match(^abc$)` but `abc` is equivalent to `re.match(.STAR?abc.STAR?)`. But yes, this is a very subtle semantic and different regex engines handle it differently. My favorite approach is to always use `.STAR?theregex.STAR?` and don't provide any additional methods. Instead, if the user wants to match from the beginning to the end, they just need to use the well known anchors. (Go's regexp package does this, and Rust borrowed that API choice as well.)