Recursive regexps?

[Magnus Lie Hetland]

Hi!

I've been looking at ways of dealing with nested structures in regexps
(becuase I figured that would be faster than the Python parsing code
I've currently got) and came across a few interesting things...

First there is this, mentioning the (?<DEPTH>) and (?<-DEPTH>)
constructs of the .NET regexp matcher:

  http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/archive.aspx?post=590

Then there was some documentation on PCRE, mentioning (among other
things) The (?R) construct, which (as far as I can tell) matches the
pattern recursively):

  http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=3&topic=pcrepattern

It seems that this functionality was introduced in Perl 5.6.

Is this (or something similar) something that would be realistic to
get in the re module? I know I would find it very useful...

-- 
Magnus Lie Hetland       Fallen flower I see / Returning to its branch
http://hetland.org       Ah! a butterfly.           [Arakida Moritake]