converting from perl: variable sized unpack

[Quinn Dunkan]

On Mon, 16 Jul 2001 14:12:52 +0200, Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
>"Roy Smith" <roy at panix.com> wrote in message
>news:roy-E01423.21425015072001 at news1.panix.com...
>> quinn at yak.ugcs.caltech.edu (Quinn Dunkan) wrote:
>> > Even without that, I argue that a bad pattern match should throw an
>> > exception and not assign None
>>
>> I have to admit, that would be somewhat consistant with the way the rest
>of
>> the language works, but it sure would make it more complicated to do
>> something like:
>>
>>    if re.match (pattern1, string):
>>       do stuff

Oops, note that I wasn't talking about regular expressions when I said
"pattern match".  The terminology is a holdover from some other languages.  I
should get in the habit of using the python terminology: sequence unpacking.

And I'm perfectly happy that failed regular expressions don't raise.  A
failing regexp is not an exceptional situation---it's normal and expected and
intended.  It would be pretty annoying to have to wrap up every re.search in
try/except.