What would [a^]* match?

Question

The meta character * means "zero or more repetitions of the previous thing". It tries to match as many repetitions as possible. The "previous thing" can be a single character, a class, or a group of characters in parentheses.
But Here we can use brackets instead of parenthesis
The answer is Zero or more repetitions of "a" or "^"
can you explain ?

Answer 1

The [] are used to signify character classes. These literally match either of the characters present in them. A metacharacter present in a character class is treated just like any other character.

Eg : [d+] matches d or +, but (d+) matches one or more occurrences of d.

There are some characters, however, that act as metacharacters only when used in certain positions. Eg : caret(^), when used as the first character, creates a negated character class. This means that all characters are matched except the ones inside. Other metacharacters include hyphen(-) between two characters, and \ for escaping these metacharacters themselves.

Metacharacters can be used on character classes in the same way as groups.

Answer 2

What would [a^]* match?

Answer :- Zero or more repetitions of "a" or "^"

Answer 3

Fill in the blanks to create a pattern that matches strings that contain one or more 42s.

Answer :- r"(42) +quot;

because + metacharacter means "one or more repetitions"