Freeze problem with Regular Expression

[John Machin]

On Jul 1, 12:45 am, Kirk <nore... at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:29:38 -0700, John Machin wrote:
> > Several problems:
>
> Ciao John (and All partecipating in this thread),
> first of all I'm sorry for the delay but I was out for business.
>
> > (1) lose the vertical bars (as advised by others) (2) ALWAYS use a raw
> > string for regexes; your \s* will match on lower- case 's', not on
> > spaces
>
> right! thanks!
>
> > (3) why are you using findall on a pattern that ends in "$"?
>
> Yes, you are right, I started with a different need and then it changed
> over time...
>
> > (6) as remarked by others, you haven't said what you are trying to do;
>
> I reply here to all of you about such point: that's not important,
> although I appreciate very much your suggestions!
> My point was 'something that works in Perl, has problems in Python'.

It *is* important; our point was 'you didn't define "works", and it
was near-impossible (without transcribing your regex into verbose
mode) to guess at what you suppose it might do sometimes'.