[Python-Dev] Should we move to replace re with regex?

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Am 27.08.2011 08:33, schrieb Terry Reedy:
> On 8/26/2011 9:56 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> 
>> Another "interesting" question is whether it's easy to port to the PEP
>> 393 string representation, if it gets accepted.
> 
> Will the re module need porting also?

That's a quality-of-implementation issue (in both cases). In principle,
the modules should continue to work unmodified, and indeed SRE does.
However, the module will then match on Py_UNICODE, which may be
expensive to produce, and may not meet your expectations of surrogate
pair handling.

So realistically, the module should be ported, which has the challenge
that matching needs to operate on three different representations. The
modules already support two representations (unsigned char and
Py_UNICODE), but probably switching on type, not on state.

Regards,
Martin