import re txt = """There aint much rain in Spain""" #Search for the sequence "ain", at the beginning of a line: print(re.findall("^ain", txt, re.MULTILINE)) #This example would return no matches without the re.MULTILINE flag, because the ^ character without re.MULTILINE only get a match at the very beginning of the text: print(re.findall("^ain", txt)) #Same result with the shorthand re.M flag: print(re.findall("^ain", txt, re.M))