this response is nothing but a description of the behavior i reported. as to whether this behaviour was intended, one would have to ask the module writer about that. because of the statement in the documentation, which places no qualification on how the scan for the shortest possible match is to be done, my guess is that this problem was overlooked.
to produce a non-greedy (minimal length) match it is required that the start of the non-greedy part of the match repeatedly be moved right with the last match of the left-hand part of the pattern (preceding the .*?). why would someone want a non-greedy (minimal length) match that was not always non-greedy (minimal length)? "André Malo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * lothar wrote: > re: > 4.2.1 Regular Expression Syntax > http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html > > *?, +?, ?? > Adding "?" after the qualifier makes it perform the match in non-greedy > or > minimal fashion; as few characters as possible will be matched. > > the regular expression module fails to perform non-greedy matches as > described in the documentation: more than "as few characters as possible" > are matched. > > this is a bug and it needs to be fixed. The documentation is just incomplete. Non-greedy regexps still start matching the leftmost. So instead the longest of the leftmost you get the shortest of the leftmost. One may consider this as a documentation bug, yes. nd -- # André Malo, <http://www.perlig.de/> # -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
