ides. So the resulting block never matches on junk except as identical junk happens to be adjacent to an "interesting" match. Here's the same example as before, but considering blanks to be junk. That prevents " abcd" from matching the " abcd" at the tail end of the second sequence directly. Instead only the "abcd" can match, and matches the leftmost "abcd" in the second sequence: >>> s = SequenceMatcher(lambda x: x==" ", " abcd", "abcd abcd") >>> s.find_longest_match(0, 5, 0, 9) Match(a=1, b=0, size=4) If no blocks match, return (alo, blo, 0). >>> s = SequenceMatcher(None, "ab", "c") >>> s.find_longest_match(0, 2, 0, 1) Match(a=0, b=0, size=0) r