[Python-Dev] Re: pre-PEP: Complete, Structured Regular Expression Group Matching (original) (raw)

Paul Moore pf_moore at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Aug 7 16:12:53 CEST 2004

Mike Coleman <mkc at mathdogs.com> writes:

Edward Loper <edloper at gradient.cis.upenn.edu> writes:

I wouldn't lose heart over the lack of response -- the current flood of decorator messages tends to drown out everything else. No, not at all. I was hoping I might benefit from @-fatigue, though. :-)

I was interested in your message as a break from @decorators, but I couldn't muster the energy to think about the proposal because I've been reading too many @decorator messages. I guess you won one way and lost the other :-)

Seriously, although I don't use the re module much (overreaction to an early exposure to Perl, I guess) the idea seems useful. I'm not entirely sure about the implementation, though - I dislike the name structmatch, as it doesn't say what's going on very well. At first I thought that having a separate method was overkill, but given that re.search and re.match both exist, I take that back.

Maybe a better name would be re.parse? The function has a "feel" of parsing a string according to a pattern.

The only other comment I have is that the semantics seem pretty complex - I think that in practice, they do more or less what you want them to, but the description is pretty obscure. And although I can see that the error return has some value, I suspect that it might actually complicate real use.

A suggestion - would it be possible to implement re.structmatch as a pure Python prototype, to thrash out some of the usability questions? If the function appears valuable in such a form, arguing for incorporation into the re module would be a lot easier.

Hope this helps, Paul.

The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory -- Paul Fix

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