f*cking re module

[Greg Lindstrom]

> That's what I love in that news group. Someone comes with a
> stupid and arrogant question, and someone else answers in a
> calm and reasonable way.

Me, too. Indeed, that's a great reason to be a part of this community.
I didn't see the original question as either stupid or arrogant; I read
it as being from a frustrated user not knowing the regular expression
package.  We've all been there.  While it would be nice if the question
could be expressed without the explatives, it does no good at all to
return the hostile tone.  Another thing I like is that after the
question was answered, other ways to approach the problem were offered
along with reasons as to why the new way is a better approach.  And no
one had to get hurt!

Perhaps Python is a victim of it's own design here.  We, or at least I,
have grown to expect things to be clear and easy to understand/use.
Regular expressions are not either, though I use them all the time (I
learned them when I was a system admin on a Sun network and tend to
fall back on them when I need a "quick fix").  I hear that Perl 6 is
going to have a rewrite of regular expressions; it will be interesting
to see what their hard work produces.

--greg