[Python-Dev] Misc re.match() complaint (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Jul 16 01:37:27 CEST 2013

Ok, created http://bugs.python.org/issue18468.

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Gregory P. Smith <greg at krypto.org> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:14 PM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

In a discussion about mypy I discovered that the Python 3 version of the re module's Match object behaves subtly different from the Python 2 version when the target string (i.e. the haystack, not the needle) is a buffer object. In Python 2, the type of the return value of group() is always either a Unicode string or an 8-bit string, and the type is determined by looking at the target string -- if the target is unicode, group() returns a unicode string, otherwise, group() returns an 8-bit string. In particular, if the target is a buffer object, group() returns an 8-bit string. I think this is the appropriate behavior: otherwise using regular expression matching to extract a small substring from a large target string would unnecessarily keep the large target string alive as long as the substring is alive. But in Python 3, the behavior of group() has changed so that its return type always matches that of the target string. I think this is bad -- apart from the lifetime concern, it means that if your target happens to be a bytearray, the return value isn't even hashable! Does anyone remember whether this was a conscious decision? Is it too late to fix? Hmm, that is not what I'd expect either. I would never expect it to return a bytearray; I'd normally assume that .group() returned a bytes object if the input was binary data and a str object if the input was unicode data (str) regardless of specific types containing the input target data. I'm going to hazard a guess that not much, if anything, would be depending on getting a bytearray out of that. Fix this in 3.4? 3.3 and earlier users are stuck with an extra bytes() call and data copy in these cases I guess. -gps

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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