Anomalous behaviour when compiling regular expressions?

[Harvey.Thomas at informa.com]

Fredrik wrote:

> your definition of "equivalent" is a bit unusual:
> 
> >>> re.match("(a|b*c*)+", "abc").groups()
> ('',)
> >>> re.match("(a|b)*", "abc").groups()
> ('b',)
> >>> re.match("(a|b|c)*", "abc").groups()
> ('c',)
> 
> that you don't get an error for
>
> >>> r = re.compile('(a|b*c*)+')
> >>> r.match('def').group()
> 
> might be a compiler bug.  running it on 2.3 gives you another error,
> though:
>
> >>> re.match("(a|b*c*)+", "abc").groups()
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>  File "C:\python23\lib\sre.py", line 132, in match
>    return _compile(pattern, flags).match(string)
> RuntimeError: maximum recursion limit exceeded
>
> (a repeated group with a min-length of zero can match anything an
infinite number of times, which is, in general, not > > what you want)

I agree to a certain extent, but by analogy

<!DOCTYPE a [
<!ELEMENT a (b | c*)+>
]>
<a></a>

is a valid SGML/XML document and their is a lot of (superficial?)
similarity between DTD content models and REs. The element declaration
would (should?) normally be written as

<!ELEMENT a (b | c)*>






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