[New-bugs-announce] [issue4882] Behavior of backreferences to named groups in regular expressions unclear

alec resnick report at bugs.python.org
Thu Jan 8 16:35:46 CET 2009


New submission from alec resnick <aresnickety at gmail.com>:

I recently learned about named groups in Python regular expressions. 
Almost all the documentation I've found online explains what they are
and give a simple example of how to use them.  I was trying to use the
variables outside of the original regex, later in the code.  Nowhere in
the documentation I found after a couple hours of searching was it
mentioned that named groups can only be backreferenced _within_ the pattern.

In particular, the sections at
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/#SECTION000530000000000000000 and
the description of the (?P<name>) behavior at
http://docs.python.org/library/re.html could be modified to make it
clear that the named capture does not create a variable usable outside
of the pattern.

I would be happy to alter the documentation appropriately.

----------
assignee: georg.brandl
components: Documentation
messages: 79417
nosy: aresnick, georg.brandl
severity: normal
status: open
title: Behavior of backreferences to named groups in regular expressions unclear
type: feature request
versions: Python 2.6

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue4882>
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