builtin regular expressions?

[Mirco Wahab]

Thus spoke MRAB (on 2006-09-30 20:54):
> Antoine De Groote wrote:
>> I just have to learn accept the fact that Python is more verbose more
>> often than Ruby (I don't know Perl really). 
>
> One of the differences between the Python way and the Perl way is that
> the Perl way has a side-effect: Perl assigns to the variables $1, $2,
> etc. each time you execute a regular expression whereas Python just
> returns a match object for each, so it's not overwriting the results of
> the previous one. I find the Python way cleaner.

This statement reduces to the fact, that

 - in Python you keep the matches if you want,
   but drop them if you don't

   import re
   text = "this is 5 some 89 stuff 12 with numbers 21 interspersed"
   matches =  re.split('\D+', text)

 - in Perl you keep the matches if you want,
   but drop them if you don't

   $text = "this is 5 some 89 stuff 12 with numbers 21 interspersed";
   @matches = $text=~/(\d+)/g;

I fail to see the benefit of a re-object, I consider these to
be just there because regexes aren't in the core language.

Regards

Mirco