Comment 2 for bug 1698990

Thanks for filing this report. The behavior you're seeing is by design. Your third search is no less specific than the first, but it's searching for a different thing.

Passing 'tag' and 'string' into a find() method makes it look for a tag whose .string value is that tag. Passing 'string' but not 'tag' makes it look for a string, not a tag.

Taking out the recursive=False in your example will illustrate this.

>>> print(head.find(string=regex))
The Dormouse's story

With recursive=True in place, no matching string is found. The string is in the document, and removing recursive=True allows find() to find it.

This is covered in the documentation for the string argument (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/#id12)