On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 10:47:54 +0100, Robin Becker wrote: > Does this in fact that almost any broken regexp specification will > silently fail because re will reset and consider any metacharacter as > literal?
Well, I don't know about "almost any", but at least some broken regexes will explicitly fail: py> import re py> re.search('*', "123*4") Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/usr/local/lib/python3.3/re.py", line 161, in search return _compile(pattern, flags).search(string) [...] File "/usr/local/lib/python3.3/sre_parse.py", line 552, in _parse raise error("nothing to repeat") sre_constants.error: nothing to repeat (For brevity I have abbreviated the traceback.) -- Steven D'Aprano http://import-that.dreamwidth.org/ -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list