a slightly hairer design issue is what combinations of pattern and string the new 're' will handle.

the first two are obvious:

ordinary pattern, ordinary string unicode pattern, unicode string

but what about these?

ordinary pattern, unicode string unicode pattern, ordinary string

I think the logical thing to do would be to "promote" the ordinary pattern or string to unicode, in a similar way to what happens if you combine ints and floats in a single expression. The result may be a bit surprising if your pattern is in ascii and you've never been aware of unicode and are given such a string from somewhere else, but then if you're only aware of integer arithmetic and are suddenly presented with a couple of floats you'll also be pretty surprised at the result. At least it's easily explained. -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.oratrix.nl/~jack | see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm