builtin regular expressions?

[Jorge Godoy]

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

> Hello,
>
> Can anybody tell me the reason(s) why regular expressions are not built into
> Python like it is the case with Ruby and I believe Perl? Like for example in
> the following Ruby code
>
> line = 'some string'
>
> case line
>   when /title=(.*)/
>     puts "Title is #$1"
>   when /track=(.*)/
>     puts "Track is #$1"
>   when /artist=(.*)/
>     puts "Artist is #$1"
> end
>
> I'm sure there are good reasons, but I just don't see them.
>
> Python Culture says: 'Explicit is better than implicit'. May it be related to
> this?

See if this isn't better to read:

================================================================================
def print_message(some_str):
    if some_str.startswith('track='):
        print "Your track is", some_str[6:]
    elif some_str.startswith('title='):
        print "It's a title of", some_str[6:]
    elif some_str.startswith('artist='):
        print "It was played by", some_str[7:]
    else:
        print "Oops, I dunno the pattern for this line..."
    return

for line in ['track="My favorite track"', 'title="My favorite song"',
             'artist="Those Dudes"', 'Something else']:
    print_message(line)
================================================================================

Expected output:

================================================================================
Your track is "My favorite track"
It's a title of "My favorite song"
It was played by "Those Dudes"
Oops, I dunno the pattern for this line...
================================================================================


I came from Perl and was used to think with regular expressions for
everything.  Now I rarely use them.  They aren't needed to solve most of the
problems. 

-- 
Jorge Godoy      <jgodoy at gmail.com>