[Tutor] Regex's and "best practice"

[Carl D Cravens]

On Sat, 22 Nov 2003, Karl [iso-8859-1] Pfl=E4sterer wrote:

> Without a little bit cheating you will have more verbose code with
> Python.  But that's nothing new nor should it be a hindrance (if the
> number of lines doesn't differ too much).

I recognize that... took me awhile to get used to, though.  It's been a
long time since I've done serious C coding, and I've forgotten just how
much "magic" and assumption there is in Perl.  When I first started
with Python (just a week ago), I was dumbfounded that an end-of-file
condition raised an exception and terminated the program if it wasn't
handled.  Didn't exactly seem convenient at all.  Of course, I then
discovered that various modules dealt with reading files more elegantly.

'import this' puts a lot of things in perspective.  And fileinput is
pretty handy.

> You could at first use search() instead of sub().

Seems that doing two regex operations instead of a simple string
comparison and a regex operation is both easier to code and simpler to
execute.

> That would mean you had to rewrite the regexps a bit.  Second you could
> use named groups (a nice thing in Python) instead of the numbers.
> Third you could write one or two functions which give you the terseness
> of Perl.

Terseness in the main code, yes... but overall I'd have to write more code
to develop functions which don't get used anywhere but here.

I'm not following your code... I need to go read about groups.

My primary purpose in posting was to be sure that I wasn't missing some
"obvious"  solution.

--
Carl D Cravens (raven at phoenyx.net)
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