[Tutor] problem with re reaching maximum recursions

[John Kenyon]

Hello all,


Have problem maybe somebody can give me some ideas on. I have a script that
goes through a bunch of files and strips the comments out of them - it looks
for '//', checks to see that it is not preceeded by ':' and then grabs to
the end of the line. A second regex then goes through and looks for other
forms of comments, i.e., "/**".

The regex I am having a problem with is as follows: slashComment =
re.compile('(?<!:)\/\/.*(\n)')

The problem is that when it hits too large a file (not sure exactly how big)
it throws a runtime exception -- "maximum recursion limit exceeded."

As far as I can tell in doing a Google search, this is a bug in 2.0 that did
not exist in 1.5. I tried importing pre instead but it seems to have a
problem with the negative look back (does anybody know if this was not a
part of the 1.5 implementation?). I have thought about breaking the file up
into smaller parts, but I am not sure quite how to do that and in any case
it would be tricky to make sure that it wasn't split across a comment. Any
ideas about how to approach this problem, maybe a more efficient regex?

Thanks in advance,

jck