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

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Tue Jul 16 04:23:55 CEST 2013

On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 7:18 PM, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:

On the other hand, I think that it's not unreasonable that the output is the same type as the input. You could reason that what it's doing is returning a slice of the input, and that slice should be the same type as its source.

By now I'm pretty sure that is why it changed.

But I am challenging how useful that is, compared to always returning something immutable.

Incidentally, the regex module does what Python 3's re module currently does, even in Python 2. Nobody's complained!

Well, you'd only see complaints from folks who (a) use the regex module, (b) use it with a buffer object as the target string, and (c) try to use the group() return value as a dict key. Each of these is probably a small majority of all users.

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

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