# Soft deprecations

There are no plans to remove `soft deprecated` APIs.

- `re.match` and `re.Pattern.match` are now `soft deprecated` in favor of the new `re.prefixmatch` and `re.Pattern.prefixmatch` APIs, which have been added as alternate, more explicit names. These are intended to be used to alleviate confusion around what *match* means by following the Zen of Python's *"Explicit is better than implicit"* mantra. Most other language regular expression libraries use an API named *match* to mean what Python has always called *search*.

  We **do not** plan to remove the older `!match` name, as it has been used in code for over 30 years. Code supporting older versions of Python should continue to use `!match`, while new code should prefer `!prefixmatch`. See `prefixmatch-vs-match`.

  (Contributed by Gregory P. Smith in `86519` and Hugo van Kemenade in `148100`.)