Anthra Norell <anthra.nor...@bluewin.ch> wrote: > def entries (l): > r = re.compile ('([0-9]+) entr(y|ies)') > match = r.search (l) > if match: return match.group (1) > > So the question is: does "r" get regex-compiled once at py-compile time > or repeatedly at entries() run time?
The docs say: The compiled versions of the most recent patterns passed to re.match (), re.search() or re.compile() are cached, so programs that use only a few regular expressions at a time needn’t worry about compiling regular expressions. (But they don't say how few is 'only a few'...) If you're concerned about it, you could always set the compiled pattern to a default value in the function's argspec, as that _is_ only executed the once: def entries(line, regex = re.compile('([0-9]+) entr(y|ies)'): match = regex.search(line) ... -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list