The thought of doing this literally didn’t occur to me... I think this is great!

Well I suppose the r in front of them in python made them look just enough "not a normal string" for me to forget how the + operator might act.

My day-to-day experience is in nodejs, where adding one regex object to another coerces them to normal strings first

[edit: hey neat, the hackernews form strips emoji from comments, I wonder if that's just ranges of unicode or if there's some crazy regex going on :D]