how to avoid leading white spaces

[Nobody]

On Sat, 04 Jun 2011 05:14:56 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> This fails to support non-ASCII letters, and you know quite well that 
> having to spell out by hand regexes in both upper and lower (or mixed) 
> case is not support for case-insensitive matching. That's why Python's re 
> has a case insensitive flag.

I find it slightly ironic that you pointed out the ASCII limitation while
overlooking the arbitrariness of upper/lower-case equivalence. Case isn't
the only type of equivalence; it's just the only one which affects ASCII.
Should we also have flags to treat half-width and full-width characters as
equivalent? What about traditional and simplified Chinese, hiragana and
katakana, or the various stylistic variants of the Latin and Greek
alphabets in the mathematical symbols block (U+1D400..U+1D7FF)?