Bug in regular expressions ?
Bernhard Herzog
bh at intevation.de
Fri May 17 11:56:50 EDT 2002
Christophe Delord <christophe.delord at free.fr> writes:
> Hi,
>
> I thought that regular expressions were greedy, so that the longuest match is returned by match().
> Consider these expressions : 'a|aa', 'aa|a' and 'aa?'
[...]
> So A|B and B|A are not always equivalent. When A and B match, B is
> ignored even if the matched text is longer. Is this a bug in the re
> module?
No. It works as documented.
> Is there a way to tell re to be "totaly greedy"?
List the longer alternatives first. Other than that, I don't know.
Bernhard
--
Intevation GmbH http://intevation.de/
Sketch http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
MapIt! http://www.mapit.de/
More information about the Python-list
mailing list