Michael J. Fromberger wrote: > > You see the difficulty don't you? How will the computer know in advance > > that the regex matches only a finite set of possible strings? > > You don't. Hence, you want something that behaves like a generator, and > will produce the strings one at a time. Preferably, for the purposes of > useful computation, in some canonical order.
Precisely, probably in order of length and value. > I'm sorry to say I don't know of an existing Python module to do this, > although you could write one for at least the basic regular expression > operators if you wanted. The basic problem isn't all that hard to > solve, though the full generality of the re module's input syntax is far > more expressive than truly "regular" expressions from language theory. I thought that was the case, I've found a paper on the topic at least. Maybe once I've finished some other work I'll give it a shot. It seems like a fairly useful thing to be able to do with a regular expression so I just guessed that somebody must have done it already. Perhaps I can find it for another language. I'm not so sure I fancy the idea of digging around in the re module in order to add the functionality there... -Blair -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
