[Python-Dev] iterator support for SRE? (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido@python.org
Wed, 24 Oct 2001 23:35:56 -0400

a common wish for SRE is a variant of findall that returns all match objects, instead of the strings.

recently, I realized that the internal scanner type (originally added to speed up Python versions of findall/sub/split) can be wrapped in an iterator, allowing the user to loop over all matches. >>> import re >>> p = re.compile(somepattern) >>> for match in iter(p.scanner(somestring).search, None): >>> print match.groups() how about adding a "finditer" method, which takes care of the low-level setup: >>> for match in p.finditer(somestring): >>> print match.groups() or should we just make the scanner factory an official part of the SRE interface?

Or both? The scanner interface seems vaguely useful as a low-level tool to create other higher-level variants; but the finditer() call seems to nicely capture a common case.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)