Bearophile - Well, I fear this may end up being another of those "easier to reinvent" wheels. All of your issues with RE's are the same ones I had with lex/yacc (and re's too) when I wrote pyparsing.
Any chance for convergence here? (BTW, there is nothing inherently wrong with "reinventing wheels". The metaphor is a bit flawed, since there are many different types of wheels in the world, and not all interchangeable - consider a tractor wheel vs. a bicycle wheel. Some legitimate/valid/justified endeavors are wrongly indicted for "reinventing the wheel" when in fact they are focusing on a particular niche of wheeldom, deserving of its own specialized invention.) -- Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
