torbencarstens

This is not quite true, while you're correct that there is no third gate, the Greenway (as pictured in the upper left corner of the 3 picture illustration you're referring to) is not the road which is shown in the "close-up" (lower center picture) of Bree which goes "To Deadman Dike".

The illustrations are taken from "The Atlas of Middle-Earth" and the road which goes diagonally north-west from the prancing pony towards the greenway (Old North Road) is described as follows in "The Atlas of Middle-Earth" (pg. 124; At the Prancing Pony):

> A drawing shows a lane which curves north from the Great [East] Road, one branch climbing to the crest of the hill, while another leads through a small opening in the hedge for a shorter route to Combe and Archet.

The "North Gate" shown on the picture is the "small opening through the hedge". I'd say it was probably marked as a "Gate" here since Bree is surrounded by a Dike/Hedge and should simply illustrate that you can't simply cross on a "normal" road here.

The drawing which is being referred to here appears in `The Return of The Shadow` (History of Middle-Earth Book 6) as `Plan of Bree` in Chapter `XX The Third Phase (2): At the Sign of the Prancing Pony`

The drawing "Plan of Bree" by Tolkien can also be seen on pg 45 (Illustration 25) in "The Art of The Lord of the Rings"

Another option when using regex would be to use the lookahead[0] operator (as long as supported, which is the case for the python re module)

  (?=(one|two|three|[...]))

would return `["two", "one"]` for the input string `twone` since the lookahead operator doesn't consume the next character.

[0] https://www.regular-expressions.info/lookaround.html