re module non-greedy matches broken

[John Ridley]

--- lothar <lothar at ultimathule.nul> wrote:
> no - in the non-greedy regex
>   <1st-pat><not-1st-pat>*?<follow-pat>
> 
> <1st-pat>, <not-1st-pat> and <follow-pat> are arbitrarily complex
> patterns.

Could you post some real-world examples of the problems you are trying
to deal with, please? Trying to come up with general solutions for
arbitrarily complex patterns is a bit to hard for me :)

> with character classes and negative character classes you do not need
> non-greediness anyway.

And yet in the simple case you supplied it does make a difference:

>>> newdoc = "V1WVVV2WWW"
>>> vwre = re.compile("V[^V]*W")
['V1W', 'V2WWW']
>>> vwre = re.compile("V[^V]*?W")
>>> vwre.findall(newdoc)
['V1W', 'V2W']

Not exactly rocket-science, but it gets the job done...


John Ridley

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