On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 3:15 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido@python.org> wrote:
On the third hand, I could see this as an area where a pure library-based approach will always be doomed, and where a proposal to add new syntax would actually make sense. Of course that still has the same problems due to release time and policy.
I suspect one of the core issues isn't so much that regex syntax is arcane, ugly and hard to remember (although those don't help), but the fact that fully general string pattern matching is inherently hard to remember due to the wide range of options. There's a reason glob-style matching is limited to a couple of simple wildcard characters. As as code based alternatives to regexes go, the one I see come up most often as a suggested, working, alternative is pyparsing (although I've never tried it myself). For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3673388/python-replacing-regex-with-bnf-o... Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia