> You aren't putting yourself in the shoes of a beginner. How do you know if I am putting myself in the shoes of a beginner or not? And what kind of beginners

> You aren't putting yourself in the shoes of a beginner. How do you know if I am putting myself in the shoes of a beginner or not? And what kind of beginners are we talking about? Are they comfortable with a browser? Do they already know how to program something? You can't expect a single document to be relevant for all kind of people. The reference documentation has a clear target audience, which apparently conflicts with what you expect from it. > And that's assuming you even realize that you should run ctrl-f, why should you? > (you've searched for sample instead of example for instance) Okay, so you are talking about absolute beginners, with no experience whatsoever with programming. And the C++ and PHP pages are somewhat useful for them? > I've already read some tutorials or am not interested > Let's say I'm a beginner [...] I want to match a regex. Now, you are saying that you already have experience with programming? Google "python tutorial regex" gives plenty of results, the first of them being currently "Regular Expressions HOWTO" (https://docs.python.org/2/howto/regex.html https://docs.python.org/2/howto/regex.html). Absolute beginners need a teacher, a mentor, or a step-by-step book, or a very gentle tutorial, or an online REPL. That's fine. You can't please everybody in the reference documentation.