Russ Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> added the comment: > You don't need to get so defensive. I did not raise a performance > problem, I was simply responding to Rafael's "AFAIK the lookup on > dictionaries is faster than on lists" comment. I did not say that you > *should* rewrite your patch the way I suggested, only that you *can* > use new language features to simplify the code.
I was responding to the entire thread more than your mail. I'm frustrated because the only substantial discussion has focused on details of how to implement set lookup the fastest in a function that likely doesn't matter for speed. > In any case, I am -0 on the patch. The current documentation says: Now these are the kinds of comments I was hoping for. Thank you. > Return *string* with all non-alphanumerics backslashed; this is useful if > you > want to match an arbitrary literal string that may have regular expression > metacharacters in it. Sure; the documentation is wrong too. > I did not see a compelling use case presented for the change. The usual convention in regular expressions is that escaping a word character means you intend a special meaning, and underscore is a word character. Even though the current re module does accept \_ as synonymous with _ (just as it accepts \q as synonymous with q), it is no more correct to escape _ than to escape q. I think it is fine to escape all non-word characters, but someone else suggested that it would be easier when moving to larger character sets to escape just the special ones. I'm happy with either version. My argument is only that Python should behave the same in this respect as other systems that use substantially the same regular expressions. > since there is no mechanism to assure that _special indeed > contains all re metacharacters, it may present a maintenance problem > if additional metacharacters are added in the future. The test suite will catch these easily, since it checks that re.escape(c) matches c for all characters c. But again, I'm happy with escaping all ASCII non-word characters. Russ __________________________________ Tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue2650> __________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
