[Python-Dev] EuroPython Language Summit report

[Georg Brandl]

On 28.06.2011 16:06, Victor Stinner wrote:
> Le mardi 28 juin 2011 à 14:41 +0100, Michael Foord a écrit :
>> On 24/06/2011 15:55, R. David Murray wrote:
>> > On Fri, 24 Jun 2011 10:52:40 +0200, Mark Dickinson<dickinsm at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> >> EuroPython 2011 Language Summit
>> >> ===============================
>> > [...]
>> >>      Unicode character classes is a particular need).  [Subtopic:  what needs
>> >>      to be done to get the new regex module into Python?  Should it replace
>> >>      the existing module?  What about backwards compatibility issues?]
>> > I'm pretty sure regex has backward compatibility as a goal for just this
>> > reason (so it can replace the current module).
>> >
>> The new regex library has some great improvements:
>> 
>>      http://bugs.python.org/issue2636
> 
> This issue is open since April 2008, has also the longest list of
> attached files, and has a very long history. What is the status of the
> issue? I see that there is now a third party project on:
> 
>    http://code.google.com/p/mrab-regex-hg/

This should be the same module as in the issue (and thankfully, because
code management of such a big project does not belong exclusively in a
tracker issue).  "mrab" stands for Matthew Barnett, who is the author of
regex.

> --
> 
> There is also the re2 library from Google and especially this project:
> 
>    http://pypi.python.org/pypi/re2/
> 
> "pyre2 is a Python extension that wraps Google's RE2 regular expression
> library.
> 
> This version of pyre2 is similar to the one you'd find at facebook's
> github repository except that the stated goal of *this version is to be
> a drop-in replacement for the re module*.)"

Well, while it can be called drop-in, it is hardly a good replacement:

"""
That being said, there are features of the re module that this module may never
have. For example, RE2 does not handle lookahead assertions ((?=...)).
"""

It falls back to old re in these cases.

Georg