Jeff, Thanks very much for that, I didn't even consider the option of it finishing, considering I'm using a much slower machine it was running for over 2 minutes when I just killed it! I think I get the rest now.
Cheers again, -David On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 17:52:22 -0600, Jeff Epler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On my machine the program finishes in 30 seconds. (it's a 1.5GHz machine) > If the 'parm' group is removed, or if the buffer is shortened, the time > is reduced considerably. > > There are "pathological cases" for regular expressions which can take > quite a long time. In the case of your expression, it's happening for > the group 'parm'. I think, but don't know, that each time a candidate > for 'parm' is found, the following '#' (or maybe the second '<'?) is not > found, and it backtracks to try to match 'parm' in a different way, > which involves considering many different combinations (basically, each > 'name=' could be the start of a new instance of the first parenthsized > subgroup of <parm>, or it could be part of the character class that > includes [a-zA-Z=]) > > You may wish to consider using other approaches for parsing this text > than regular expressions. > > Jeff > > > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
