Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 07:38:11 am Mark Dickinson wrote:
Steven, could you show some examples of real(ish)-world use-cases for one or both of these functions? Preferably including the code that might directly follow a multimatch or multisearch call.
I'm afraid that I don't use regexes anywhere near enough to champion this proposal in the face of serious opposition, or even skepticism. If this isn't a simple enough "no-brainer", then I'm going to have to pass the baton onto somebody else (assuming anyone actually likes this idea).
This idea came about from the thread started by Sean Reifschneider, proposing adding regexes to strings. I thought (and Sean seemed to agree) that these convenience functions would solve his primary use-case. So this proposal isn't scratching an itch I have.
It's probably because I haven't used regexes widely enough, but in all the potential examples I can come up with, either
(1) the regexes are similar enough that they can be refactored into a single regex (e.g., just concatenated with '|'), or
(2) they're distinct enough that each regex needs its own handing, so that the multimatch/multisearch would need to be followed by a multiway 'if/elif/else' anyway; in this case, it seems that little is gained.
These are both reasonable approaches. This proposal isn't supposed to solve every multiple-regex-handling problem.
So far support for this has been luke-warm. If anyone really likes this idea, please speak up, otherwise I'll let it drop.
If you want to try multiple regexes until one matches then the approach with re.match accepting a tuple of patterns would, it seems to me, to be the one that requires the smallest change and has the greatest precedence (like str.startwith).