at this time, SRE uses types instead of classes for compiled patterns and matches. these classes provide a documented interface, and a bunch of internal attributes, for example:
RegexObjects:
code -- a PCRE code object pattern -- the source pattern groupindex -- maps group names to group indices
MatchObjects:
regs -- same as match.span()? groupindex -- as above re -- the pattern object used for this match string -- the target string used for this match
the problem is that some other modules use these attributes directly. for example, xmllib.py uses the pattern attribute, and other code I've seen uses regs to speed things up.
in SRE, I would like to get rid of all these (except possibly for the match.string attribute).
opinions?
Sounds reasonable. All std lib modules that violate this will need to be fixed once sre.py replaces re.py. (Checkin of sre is next.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)