any chance regular expressions are cached?

[Ryan Ginstrom]

> On Behalf Of Tim Chase
> Sounds like what you want is to use the compile() call to 
> compile once, and then use the resulting objects:
> 
>    re1 = re.compile(r'\n')
>    re2 = re.compile(r'^')
>    ...
>    s = re1.sub('\n' + spaces, s)
>    s = re2.sub(spaces, s)

Yes. And I would go a step further and suggest that regular expressions are
best avoided in favor of simpler things when possible. That will make the
code easier to debug, and probably faster.

A couple of examples:
>>> text = """spam spam spam
spam spam


 spam

    spam"""
>>> # normalize newlines
>>> print "\n".join([line for line in text.splitlines() if line])
spam spam spam
spam spam
 spam
    spam
>>> # normalize whitespace
>>> print " ".join(text.split())
spam spam spam spam spam spam spam
>>> # strip leading/trailing space
>>> text = "  spam  "
>>> print text.lstrip()
spam  
>>> print text.rstrip()
  spam
>>> print text.strip()
spam

Regards,
Ryan Ginstrom