[Python-Dev] \G (match last position) regex operator non-existant in python?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 29 October 2017 at 09:31, MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:

> On 2017-10-28 22:05, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>
>> I don't condone having two different regex implementations/APIs bundled
>> in any form, even if one were to be deprecated -- we'd never get rid of the
>> deprecated one until 4.0. (FWIW I don't condone this pattern for other
>> packages/modules either.) Note that even if we outright switched there
>> would *still* be two versions, because regex itself has an internal
>> versioning scheme where V0 claims to be strictly compatible with re and V1
>> explicitly changes the matching rules in some cases. (I don't know if this
>> means that you have to request V1 to use \G though.)
>>
>> The other problem with outright replacement is that despite Matthew's
>> best efforts there may be subtle incompatibilities that will break people's
>> code in surprising ways. I don't recall much about our current 're' test
>> suite -- I'm sure it tests every feature, but I'm not sure how far it goes
>> in testing edge cases. IIRC this is where in the past we've always erred on
>> the side of (extreme) caution, and my recollection is of Matthew being
>> (understandably!) pretty lukewarm about doing extra work to help assess
>> this -- IIRC he's totally fine with the status quo.
>>
>> If there's new information or a change in Matthew's outlook I'd be happy
>> to reconsider it.
>>
>> At one time I was in favour of including it in the stdlib, but then I
> changed my mind. Having it outside gives me more flexibility, and I'm happy
> with just using pip.
>

OK, so I think that leaves the notion of a "Recommended baseline package
set" as the most realistic option we have for improvement in this area -
coming up with a way for us as the standard library maintainers to make
particular 3rd party components more readily available to end users, while
also providing explicit guidance to 3rd party redistributors that we think
those components should be offered by default in general purpose scripting
environments.

I'll start a thread on python-ideas about that, as I think we could get
quite some way towards that goal with just some minor additions to the
ensurepip and venv modules (using existing documented third party
recommendations like those in the re docs for regex and the urllib.request
docs for requests), without actually bundling anything directly into the
python.org installers.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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