Message 66422 - Python tracker (original) (raw)

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 12:12 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:

Alexander Belopolsky <belopolsky@users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 11:45 AM, Russ Cox <report@bugs.python.org> wrote: ..

My argument is only that Python should behave the same in this respect as other systems that use substantially the same regular expressions.

This is not enough to justify the change in my view. After all, "A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds" <http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/>.

I don't know if there is much code out there that relies on the current behavior, but technically speaking, this is an incompatible change. A backward compatible way to add your desired functionality would be to add the "escape_special" function, but not every useful 3-line function belongs to stdlib.

In my mind, arguing that re.escape can't possibly be changed due to imagined backward incompatibilities is the foolish consistency.

This said, I would prefer simply adding '_' to _alphanum over _special approach, but still -1 on the whole idea.

I don't use Python enough to care one way or the other. I noticed a bug, I reported it. Y'all are welcome to do as you see fit.

Russ