EXI-Andrews, Jack wrote: > > that's a misunderstanding of what a regular expression is, though: > > conceptually, a RE describes a set of strings, and the RE engine is > > designed to answer the question "does this string belong to this > > set".
> if that's so, what is the point of +? and *? (?) to influence which string to pick from the set, when a target string can match multiple members. > seems to me it's a bit more pragmatic than pure set membership your assertion was that a RE should *fail* if you used greedy matching. that's not how RE's work. </F> -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
