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

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Jul 17 06:15:16 CEST 2013

Terry Reedy writes:

On 7/15/2013 10:20 PM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

Or is this something deeper, that a group is a new object in principle?

No, I just think of it as returning "a string"

That is exactly what the doc says it does. See my other post.

The problem is that IIUC '"a string"' is intentionally not referring to the usual "str or bytes objects" (at least that's one of the standard uses for scare quotes, to indicate an unusual usage). Either the docstring is using "string" in a similarly ambiguous way, or else it's incorrect under the interpretation that buffer objects are not "strings", so they should be inadmissible as targets. Something should be fixed, and I suppose it should be the return type of group().

BTW, I suggest that Terry's usage of "string" (to mean "str or bytes" in 3.x, "unicode or str" in 2.x) be adopted, and Guido's "stringish" be given expanded meaning, including buffer objects. Then we can say informally that in searching and matching a target is a stringish, the pattern is a stringish (?) or compiled re, but the group method returns a string.

Steve

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