python - Number of regex matches

Question

I'm using the finditer function in the re module to match some things and everything is working.

Now I need to find out how many matches I've got. Is it possible without looping through the iterator twice? (one to find out the count and then the real iteration)

Some code:

imageMatches = re.finditer("<img src="(?P<path>[-/w.]+)"", response[2])
# <Here I need to get the number of matches>
for imageMatch in imageMatches:
    doStuff

Everything works, I just need to get the number of matches before the loop.

Answer 1

If you know you will want all the matches, you could use the re.findall function. It will return a list of all the matches. Then you can just do len(result) for the number of matches.