On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Steven D'Aprano<steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
Following the thread "Experiment: Adding "re" to string objects.", I would like to propose the addition of two convenience functions to the re module:
def multimatch(s, *patterns): """Do a re.match on s using each pattern in patterns, returning the first one to succeed, or None if they all fail.""" for pattern in patterns: m = re.match(pattern, s) if m: return m
def multisearch(s, *patterns): """Do a re.search on s using each pattern in patterns, returning the first one to succeed, or None if they all fail.""" for pattern in patterns: m = re.search(pattern, s) if m: return m
[...]
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. 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. -- Mark