Does my RE rock, or suck?

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hello Bryan,

>     Is this likely to be fast in normal cases?  Is there a
>     clearly better approach?

Yes, it should be fast, since no repetitive backtracking will happen.

>     What would be the worst-case time?

Given the context (person names), your worst case will probably be
failing every name.

>     Am I likely to exceed recursion depth?

You won't, unless you find a name with thousands of words, and
variants for every word. With Python 2.4, you'll only get in
trouble if you exceed your system's memory.

>     Any other gotcha?  Am I likely to find it when I compile the
>     RE, or when I try to match a path?

It looks like a sane use of regular expressions.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net