[Tutor] Regex's and "best practice"

[Lloyd Kvam]

Carl D Cravens wrote:
> Hello.  I'm a Unix sysadmin and developer with a background in C (a few
.....
> ## three formats to deal with (a bare address falls through)
> ## <address> , Name <address>, (Name) address
> $line ~= s/(^<)(.*)(>$)/$2/ ||
>     $line =~ s/<.*>// ||
>     $line ~=s/(.*)(\()(.*)(\))(.*)/$3/;
> 
> 
> idpatt = [ re.compile( '(^<)(.*)(>$)' ),
>            re.compile( '<.*>' ),
>            re.compile( '(.*)(\()(.*)(\))(.*)' ) ]
> 
> idrepl = ['\\2', '', '\\3']
> 
> oldline = line
> for idpt,idrp in zip( idpatt, idrepl ):
>     line = idpt.sub( idrp, line )
>     if oldline != line:
>         break
> 
> Not nearly as compact and simple as the Perl statement.
> Is this pretty much the best I can do?  The OR's were very convenient in
> Perl... in Python, I have to do relatively large amount of work to get the
> same effect.  (And I don't think it's necessary... I could let Python
> evaluate all threee sub()'s, even when further evaluation won't find
> anything to match.)  That would reduce the last block to...
> 
> for idpt,idrp in zip( idpatt, idrepl ):
>     line = idpt.sub( idrp, line )
> 
> ...which doesn't look so bad, but it keeps processing the sub()'s even
> after a match has been made.
> 
> Is there something obvious I'm missing, or is this a fair solution to the
> problem?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> --
> Carl D Cravens (raven at phoenyx.net)
> Talk is cheap because supply inevitably exceeds demand.

I would call it a fair solution.  Perl is very hard to beat on the regex
front simply because regular expressions are in the language, not a module.

For a sysadmin, I think the win with python is the ease of writing reusable
modules that are tailored for your system.  I presumme you understand Python's
if __name__ == '__main__':
idiom.  This allows a python script to detect that it is being run as a
"command" rather than being imported.  So any python script can do double
duty, it's a useful command file AND it is importable to provide useful
subroutines/objects for other scripts.

This is much better than copying and pasting code from one file to another.

-- 
Lloyd Kvam
Venix Corp.
1 Court Street, Suite 378
Lebanon, NH 03766-1358

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