[BangPypers] Parse multi line with re module.

[Pratap Chakravarthy]

The ball is in my court alright. But you have played my turn as well, with your
explanations, and you played it good. Except for the paragraph about the
boss. I only beg to differ from your suggestion "... used sparingly, if at
all used".

And I still beg to differ /

Cheers,

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:53 PM, Gora Mohanty <gora at mimirtech.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 8:31 PM, Pratap Chakravarthy <prataprc at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Mean no offence to you personally,
>>
>> None taken.
>
> Thank you for taking things in a good spirit: Personally speaking,
> I discover almost each day how ignorant I am compared to other
> people, in many contexts. True knowledge should be the progressive
> discovery of one's ignorance.
>
>>                    I believe Ganesh might take your more specific regex and
>> use that with findall() grouping to get what he wants. It is always a
>> good practice to be more specific in composing regular expressions,
>> carelessly composed PCRE (where P stands for Perl ;) ) regex can lead
>> to exponential complexity for simple inputs.
>
> Um, that "exponential complexity" is *exactly* the problem.
>
> Regular expressions are extremely powerful, and can and
> maybe should be used in the right context. I presume that
> everyone has read Jamie Zawinski's rants about regular
> expressions.
>
> I wish that I could find again the story of someone, whose boss
> barely looked at his regular expression that spanned half-a-screen,
> and said that "you have a bug". The (obviously talented)
> developer spent over a day finding edge-cases, and went back
> to his boss, and said: "You are right, but please tell me how
> you could tell at a glance". Boss' answer was that he did not
> actually know that there was a bug, but the use of a regular
> expression of that size pretty much assured him that there
> would be one.
>
> As someone said in another context (about C++), when
> regular expressions are your only tool, every problem
> looks like your thumb.
>
>>> but this thread should again be a reason why regular
>>> expressions should be used sparingly, if at all,
>>> and against well-validated input.
>>
>> Really ?
>> I beg to differ.
>
> *Really?* I believe that the ball is currently in your court.
> It was *your* regex that was broken, and badly, if I may
> add.
>
> Regards,
> Gora
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-- 
Pratap.