Google for "optimized regexp" returns: http://laurent.riesterer.free.fr/regexp/make-regexp.html http://search.cpan.org/~dankogai/Regexp-Optimizer-0.15/
There are several more links, but all appear to be written in languages other than Python. Perhaps you could port one of them. It also seems that a similar thread came up here recently, at least in the special form of converting a list of words to a single regexp. In general, this seems to be a difficult problem, not only to implement, but to test. At least the conversion of a list of words to a single regexp is easily tested against the input set, although as some of the other clever posters have noted, it is possible to create a regexp that is *too* matchable. -- Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
