leftmost longest match (of disjunctions) ; greediness of "|"

[Joerg Schuster]

"Fredrik Lundh" <fredrik at pythonware.com> writes:

> you can use "sre_parse.parse(x).getwidth()" on a subexpression, to
> get the shortest/longest possible match.
> 
> >>> from sre_parse import parse
> >>> parse("a?").getwidth()
> (0, 1)
> >>> parse("ab").getwidth()
> (2, 2)
> >>> parse(".+").getwidth()
> (1, 65535)
> 
> (where >=65535 should be interpreted as "any number")
> 
> </F>

Thanks for the tip.