A bug in Python's regular expression engine?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality wrote:

>     This won't compile for me:
> 
> 
> regex = re.compile('(.*\\).*')
> 
> 
>     I get the error:
> 
> 
> sre_constants.error: unbalanced parenthesis
> 
> 
>     I'm running Python 2.5 on WinXP.  I've tried this expression with
> another RE engine in another language and it works just fine which leads
> me
> to believe the problem is Python.  Can anyone confirm or deny this bug?

It pretty much says what the problem is - you escaped the closing
parenthesis, resulting in an invalid rex.

Either use raw-strings or put the proper amount of backslashes in your
string:

regex = re.compile(r'(.*\\).*') # raw string literal

regex = re.compile('(.*\\\\).*') # two consecutive \es, meaning an escaped
one

Diez