Regular Expressions
Steven D'Aprano
steve at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au
Sun Feb 11 05:25:01 EST 2007
On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 07:05:30 +0000, Steve Holden wrote:
> Geoff Hill wrote:
>> What's the way to go about learning Python's regular expressions? I feel
>> like such an idiot - being so strong in a programming language but knowing
>> nothing about RE.
>>
>>
> In fact that's a pretty smart stance.
That's a little harsh -- regexes have their place, together with pointer
arithmetic, bit manipulations, reverse polish notation and goto. The
problem is when people use them inappropriately e.g. using a regex when a
simple string.find will do.
> A quote attributed variously to
> Tim Peters and Jamie Zawinski says "Some people, when confronted with a
> problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two
> problems."
I believe that is correctly attributed to Jamie Zawinski.
--
Steven
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