a non-greedy match - as implicitly defined in the documentation - is a match in which there is no proper substring in the return which could also match the regex.
you are skirting the issue as to why a matcher should not be able to return a non-greedy match. there is no theoretical reason why it can not be done. "André Malo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > * "lothar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > no - in the non-greedy regex > > <1st-pat><not-1st-pat>*?<follow-pat> > > > > <1st-pat>, <not-1st-pat> and <follow-pat> are arbitrarily complex patterns. > > The "not" is the problem. Regex patterns are expressed positive by > definition (meaning, you can say, what you expect, but not what you > don't expect). In other words, regexps were invented to define (uh... regular) > sets, nothing more (especially you can't define "non-sets"). So the usual > way is to define the set you've called '<not-1st-pat>*?' and describe > it as regex. Modern regular expression engines (which are no longer regular > by the way ;-) allow shortcuts like negative lookahead assertions and the > like. > > I want to make clear, that it isn't, that nobody _wants_ to give an advice > how to express your pattern in general. The point is, that there's no > real syntax for it. It depends on how your <1st-pat> and <follow-pat> look > like. Chances are, that's even not expressable in one regex (depends on > the complexity and kind of the set they define). > Each pattern you write is special to the particular use case. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
