how to avoid leading white spaces

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, 04 Jun 2011 21:02:32 +0100, Nobody wrote:

> 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 is hardly arbitrary. It's *extremely* common, at least in Western 
languages, which you may have noticed we're writing in :-P


> 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)?

Perhaps we should. But since Python regexes don't support such flags 
either, I fail to see your point.



-- 
Steven