Tokens?

[Fredrik Lundh]

"BBands" wrote:

> In the invaluable 'Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! - weekly Python news and
> links' of April 17 Peter Otten writes: "Michele Simionato's little
> script lets you search for a name in Python scripts, avoiding false
> positives that a standard tool like grep would yield." Can someone
> explain why this is so?

consider grepping for "main" in this script:

    def main():
        # this is the main function
        print "hello, main"

    if __name__ == "__main__":
        main()

a standard grep will find five instances.  a word grep will find four.  a name
token grep will find two.

</F>