On 2011-09-15 15:02, MRAB wrote:
The regex module at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex currently uses a compromise, where it matches 'I' with 'i' and also 'I' with 'ı' and 'İ' with 'i'.I was wondering if it would be preferable to have a TURKIC flag instead ("(?T)" or "(?T:...)" in the pattern).
I think the problem many people ignore when coming up with solutions like this is that while this behaviour is pretty much unique for Turkish script, there is no guarantee that Turkish substrings won't appear in other language strings (or vice versa).
For example, foreign names in Turkish are often given as spelled in their native (non-Turkish) script variants. Likewise, Turkish names in other languages are often given as spelled in Turkish.
The Turkish 'I' is a peculiarity that will probably haunt us programmers until hell freezes over. Unless Turkey abandons its traditional orthography or people start speaking only a single language at a time (including names), there's no easy way to deal with this.
In other words: the only way to make use of your proposed flag is if you have a fully language-tagged input (e.g. an XML document making extensive use of xml:lang) and only ever apply regular expressions to substrings containing one culture at a time.
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