Making regex suck less

[Max M]

Carl Banks wrote:

>>What would the equivalent of r"(.)(.)(.)\3\2\1"
>>This means a "palindrome of 6 characters"
>>But it is unlikely that the human readable processor would understand 
>>that (isn't it??)



Why not just write the parts of the regex as named strings?

like::

     name = '[a-zA-Z0-9_.]+'
     at = '@'
     dot = '\.'
     topDomain = 'com|org|dk'
     email = name + at + name + dot + topDomain

instead of::

     email = '[a-zA-Z0-9_.]+@[a-zA-Z0-9_.]+\.com|org|dk'

Well my syntax is most likely wrong as I suck at regex, but the meaning 
should be clear enough.