Correct syntax for pathological re.search()
Peter J. Holzer
hjp-python at hjp.at
Sat Oct 12 06:59:58 EDT 2024
On 2024-10-11 17:13:07 -0400, AVI GROSS via Python-list wrote:
> Is there some utility function out there that can be called to show what the
> regular expression you typed in will look like by the time it is ready to be
> used?
I assume that by "ready to be used" you mean the compiled form?
No, there doesn't seem to be a way to dump that. You can
p = re.compile("\\\\sout{")
print(p.pattern)
but that just prints the input string, which you could do without
compiling it first.
But - without having looked at the implementation - it's far from clear
that the compiled form would be useful to the user. It's probably some
kind of state machine, and a large table of state transitions isn't very
readable.
There are a number of websites which visualize regular expressions.
Those are probably better for debugging a regular expression than
anything the re module could reasonably produce (although with the
caveat that such a web site would use a different implementation and
therefore might produce different results).
hp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) | |
| | | hjp at hjp.at | -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | challenge!"
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