> Ah ha, thar's the disconnect. Thanks for all the pointers, my def is > now working. Still don't understand the logic behind this design though. > I mean why would any programming language have separate search or find > functions, one for regex and and another for non-regex based pattern > matching? > > Aren't sed, awk, grep, and perl the reference implementations of search > and replace? They don't have non-regex functions, why does Python? > Wouldn't it be a lot simpler to use a flag, like grep's '-f', to change > the meaning of a search string to be literal?
And by this possibly destroying other modules code that rely on their respective strings being that - and not patterns. > My other gripe is with the kludgy object-oriented regex functions. > Couldn't these be better implemented in-line? Why should I, as a coder, > have to 're.compile()' when all the reference languages do this at compile > time, from a much more straightforward and easy to read in-line > function... You can do that already, no need to - the patterns are cached. Albeit the cache might be limited in size. but code like m = re.match(pattern, s) is not considerably slower than rex = re.compile(pattern) m = rex.match(s) Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
