builtin regular expressions?

[Jorge Godoy]

Antoine De Groote <antoine at vo.lu> writes:

> Just to get it clear at the beginning, I started this thread. I'm not a newbie

Sorry :-)  I got to this wrong conclusion because of the way I read your
message.

> an expert either, but I'm quite comfortable with the language by now. It's
> just that, when I started Python I loved it for its simplicity and for the
> small amount of code it takes to get something done. So the idea behind my

See that being "small" is not all that important.  From the Zen of Python:

    Explicit is better than implicit.

> original post was that the Perl/Ruby way takes even less to type (for the
> regex topic of this discussion, I'm not generalizing), and that I like a
> lot. To me (and I may be alone) the Perl/Ruby way is more "beautiful" (Python
> culture: Beautiful is better than ugly) than the Python way (in this
> particular case) and therefore I couldn't see the reasons.

You can import the re module and use regular expressions in Python, but you
probably know that.

> Some of you say that this regex stuff is used rarely enough so that being
> verbose (and therefore more readable ?) is in these few cases the better
> choice. To me this a perfectly reasonable and maybe it is just true (as far as
> one can talk about true/false for something subjective as this). I dont' know
> (yet) ;-)

It is to me. :-)  If you're parsing simple structures then it might not be to
you (for complex structures you'd end up with some sort of parser).

> I just have to learn accept the fact that Python is more verbose more often
> than Ruby (I don't know Perl really). Don't get me wrong though, I know the
> benefits of this (at least in some cases) and I can understand that one opts
> for it. Hopefully I will end up some day preferring the Python way.

One thing that is also interesting: code completion.  One editor can help you
write "startswith" but it can't help with "/^".  The same goes for "endswith"
compared to "$/".  

I just mentioned this because in the argument of "less code to write leads to
less bugs" doesn't mean that we have typed all what is written :-)

-- 
Jorge Godoy      <jgodoy at gmail.com>