Aahz wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>Search for r'^something' can never be better/faster than match for >>r'something', and with a dopey implementation of search [which Python's >>re is NOT] it could be much worse. So please don't tell newbies to >>search for r'^something'. > > > You're somehow getting mixed up in thinking that "^" is some kind of > "not" operator -- it's the start of line anchor in this context.
I can't imagine where you got that idea from. If I change "[which Python's re is NOT]" to "[Python's re's search() is not dopey]", does that help you? The point was made in a context where the OP appeared to be reading a line at a time and parsing it, and re.compile(r'something').match() would do the job; re.compile(r'^something').search() will do the job too -- BECAUSE ^ means start of line anchor -- but somewhat redundantly, and very inefficiently in the failing case with dopey implementations of search() (which apply match() at offsets 0, 1, 2, .....). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
