Walter Dörwald writes:
A `find()` that supports multiple search strings (and returns the leftmost position where a search string can be found) is a great help in implementing some kind of tokenizer:
In other words, you want the equivalent of Emacs's "(search-forward (regexp-opt list-of-strings))", which also meets the requirement of returning which string was found (as "(match-string 0)"). Since Python already has a functionally similar API for regexps, we can add a regexp-opt (with appropriate name) method to re, perhaps as .compile_string_list(), and provide a convenience function re.search_string_list() for your application. I'm applying practicality before purity, of course. To some extent we want to encourage simple string approaches, and putting this in regex is not optimal for that. Steve