The Match objects returned by re.match and re.search internally stores the number of match groups:

>>> r = re.compile('hello my ([^ ]+) is ([^ .]+).')
>>> m = r.search('hello my name is lars')
>>> m
<match num=3>

This value isn't currently exposed in Python. The workaround for iterating through available matches, which we see in some of the tests, is sort of clunky:

def print_groups(match):
    print('----')
    try:
        i = 0
        while True:
            print(match.group(i))
            i += 1
    except IndexError:
        pass

I've read through the contributor guidelines, and since there exists a workaround I understand that simply exposing the match count may not be a priority. Would you accept a documentation pr that includes some variant of the above example in the ure module documentation?