String comparison question

[Fredrik Lundh]

Michael Spencer wrote:

> a.split() == b.split() is a convenient test, provided you want to normalize
> whitespace rather than ignore it.  I took the OP's requirements to mean that
> 'A   B' == 'AB', but this is just a guess.

I'm sure someone has studied this in more detail, but intuitively, partially
based on common mistakes when writing regular expressions, I'd say that
when people talk about "any number of something", they mean "one or
more" more often than not.

</F>