Abe Dillon writes:
> My 2 cents is that regular expressions are pretty un-pythonic because of
> their horrible readability. I would much rather see Python adopt something
> like Verbal Expressions (
> https://github.com/VerbalExpressions/PythonVerbalExpressions ) into the
> standard library than add special syntax support for normal REs.
You think that example is more readable than the proposed transalation
^(http)(s)?(\:\/\/)(www\.)?([^\ ]*)$
which is better written
^https?://(www\.)?[^ ]*$
or even
^https?://[^ ]*$
which makes it obvious that the regexp is not very useful from the
word "^"? (It matches only URLs which are the only thing, including
whitespace, on the line, probably not what was intended.)
Are those groups capturing in Verbal Expressions? The use of "find"
(~ "search") rather than "match" is disconcerting to the experienced
user. What does alternation look like? How about alternation of
non-trivial regular expressions? Etc, etc.
As far as I can see, Verbal Expressions are basically a way of making
it so painful to write regular expressions that people will restrict
themselves to regular expressions that would be quite readable in
traditional notation! I don't think that this failure to respect the
developer's taste is restricted to this particular implementation,
either. They *are* regular expressions, just with a verbose,
obstructive notation.
Far more important than "more readable" regular expressions would be a
parsing library in the stdlib, reducing the developer's temptation to
parse using complex regular expressions. IMHO YMMV etc.
Steve
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