The ball is in my court alright. But you have played my turn as well, with your explanations, and you played it good. Except for the paragraph about the boss. I only beg to differ from your suggestion "... used sparingly, if at all used".
And I still beg to differ / Cheers, On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Gora Mohanty <g...@mimirtech.com> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:31 PM, Pratap Chakravarthy <prata...@gmail.com> > wrote: >>> Mean no offence to you personally, >> >> None taken. > > Thank you for taking things in a good spirit: Personally speaking, > I discover almost each day how ignorant I am compared to other > people, in many contexts. True knowledge should be the progressive > discovery of one's ignorance. > >> I believe Ganesh might take your more specific regex and >> use that with findall() grouping to get what he wants. It is always a >> good practice to be more specific in composing regular expressions, >> carelessly composed PCRE (where P stands for Perl ;) ) regex can lead >> to exponential complexity for simple inputs. > > Um, that "exponential complexity" is *exactly* the problem. > > Regular expressions are extremely powerful, and can and > maybe should be used in the right context. I presume that > everyone has read Jamie Zawinski's rants about regular > expressions. > > I wish that I could find again the story of someone, whose boss > barely looked at his regular expression that spanned half-a-screen, > and said that "you have a bug". The (obviously talented) > developer spent over a day finding edge-cases, and went back > to his boss, and said: "You are right, but please tell me how > you could tell at a glance". Boss' answer was that he did not > actually know that there was a bug, but the use of a regular > expression of that size pretty much assured him that there > would be one. > > As someone said in another context (about C++), when > regular expressions are your only tool, every problem > looks like your thumb. > >>> but this thread should again be a reason why regular >>> expressions should be used sparingly, if at all, >>> and against well-validated input. >> >> Really ? >> I beg to differ. > > *Really?* I believe that the ball is currently in your court. > It was *your* regex that was broken, and badly, if I may > add. > > Regards, > Gora > _______________________________________________ > BangPypers mailing list > BangPypers@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers -- Pratap. _______________________________________________ BangPypers mailing list BangPypers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
