Regular expression bug?
Ron Garret
rNOSPAMon at flownet.com
Thu Feb 19 13:55:01 EST 2009
I'm trying to split a CamelCase string into its constituent components.
This kind of works:
>>> re.split('[a-z][A-Z]', 'fooBarBaz')
['fo', 'a', 'az']
but it consumes the boundary characters. To fix this I tried using
lookahead and lookbehind patterns instead, but it doesn't work:
>>> re.split('((?<=[a-z])(?=[A-Z]))', 'fooBarBaz')
['fooBarBaz']
However, it does seem to work with findall:
>>> re.findall('(?<=[a-z])(?=[A-Z])', 'fooBarBaz')
['', '']
So the regular expression seems to be doing the Right Thing. Is this a
bug in re.split, or am I missing something?
(BTW, I tried looking at the source code for the re module, but I could
not find the relevant code. re.split calls sre_compile.compile().split,
but the string 'split' does not appear in sre_compile.py. So where does
this method come from?)
I'm using Python2.5.
Thanks,
rg
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