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
