[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Frederic Rentsch wrote: > > > >> If you need regexes, why not just reverse-sort your expressions? This >> seems a lot easier and faster than writing another regex compiler. >> Reverse-sorting places the longer ones ahead of the shorter ones. >> > > Unfortunately, not all regular expressions have a fixed match length. > Which is the longest of, for example, /(abc)?def/ and /(def)?ghi/ > depends on the input. > > Lorenzo Gatti > > Very true! Funny you should remind me, considering that I spent quite some time upgrading SE to allow regular expressions. Version 1 didn't and could resolve precedence at compile time. Version 2 resolves precedence at runtime by length of the matches and should function correctly in this respect, although it might not function fast enough for speed-critical applications. But then there is in general a trade-off between convenience and speed.
Frederic -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list