Thank you very much, Tim and Monkee. In fact, what I'm doing is handle a lot of regular expressions. I wanted to build VERY LONG regexps part by part and put them all into a file for easy modification and maintenance. The idea is like this:
(*INT) = \d+ (*DECIMAL) = (*INT)\.(*INT) (*FACTION) = (*DECIMAL)/(*DECIMAL) (*NUMERALS) = (*FACTION)|(*DECIMAL)|(*INT) ... ... What's inside the sytactically wrong (* and ) is something to be replaced, and then I wrote a little script to do the string substitution, to get very long regexps to be compiled. I thought that might be a way to handle long and complex regexps, and in this course I encountered the problem with the semantics of '|'. My approach may sound desperate and funny, but please, do you have any good idea as to how to handle long and complex regexps? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
