On 4/21/2011 6:16 AM, Neil Cerutti wrote:
On 2011-04-20, John Nagle<na...@animats.com> wrote:
Findall does something a bit different. It returns a list of
matches of the entire pattern, not repeats of groups within
the pattern.
Consider a regular expression for matching domain names:
kre = re.compile(r'^([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+)(?:\.([a-zA-Z0-9\-]+))+$')
s = 'www.example.com'
ms = kre.match(s)
ms.groups()
('www', 'com')
msall = kre.findall(s)
msall
[('www', 'com')]
This is just a simple example. But it illustrates an unnecessary
limitation. The matcher can do the repeated matching; you just can't
get the results out.
Thanks for the further explantion.
Assuming a fake API that returned multiple group matches as a
tuple:
? print(re.match(r"^([a-z])+$", "abcdef").groups())
(('a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f'),)
I was thinking of applying findall something like this, but you
have to make multiple calls:
m = re.match(r"^[a-z]+$", s)
if m:
... print(re.findall(r"[a-z]", m.group()))
...
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f']
I can see that getting really annoying. Is there a better way to
make multiple group matches accessible without adding a third
element type as a group element?
The most elegant solution would be to have a regular expression
function that returned a tree of tuples or lists. Then you could
express an entire language syntax as a regular expression and
get out a parse tree.
Since the regular expression system is actually doing that work,
then discarding the results, it seems a reasonable extension.
I'm not suggesting extending regular expression matching itself,
just the way the results are stored.
John Nagle
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