This pattern matches year numbers in the range 1000-2999.
The '$' character is the end-of-line
anchor, and matches only at the end of a string.
YEAR_PAT = re.compile (
r'[12]' # First digit must be 1 or 2
r'\d{3}' # Followed by three more digits
r'$' ) # Insure that the entire string was matched