[Python-3000] regex literals?

[Guido van Rossum]

Do I even have to say -1?

Regular expressions shouldn't become the front and central of Python's
text processing tools.

--Guido

On 8/29/06, tomer filiba <tomerfiliba at gmail.com> wrote:
> i can't say i'm too fond of this, but i thought of bringing this up. most
> scripting
> languages (perl, ruby, and boo, to name some) have regular expressions as
> language literals. since such languages are heavily used for string
> manipulation, it might seem like a good idea to add them at the syntax
> level:
>
> e"[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]*"
>
> i thought of prefixing "e" for "regular *e*xpression". could also be "p" for
> pattern.
> it's very simple -- regex literal strings are just passed to re.compile(),
> upon
> creation, i.e.:
> a = e"[A-Z]"
>
> is the same as
> a = re.compile("[A-Z]")
>
> what is it good for?
>
>  if e"[A-Z]".match("Q"):
>     print "success"
>
> since strings (as well as regex strings) are immutable, the compiler can
> re.compile them at compile time, as an optimization.
>
>  again, i can't say i'like regex literals, and i don't think it would be a
> productivity boost (although you would no longer need to import re and
> re.compile() your patterns)... but i wanted to bring it to your
> consideration.
>
>
> -tomer
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-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)