[Python-Dev] Some questions about maintenance of the regular expression code.

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

M.-A. Lemburg asked:
 > Hmm, could you explain where ".*?" is useful ?

Gary Herron responded:
 > Yes, easily.  It's the non-greedy version of "match all".  The manual
 > page for the re module has this nice example:

I think the problem is that .*? is too similar to (.*)? -- especially
for people who aren't familiar with the non-greedy versions of the
operators.  This certainly stumped me as well.

I'm not sure what can be done about that, though.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation