+ in regular expression

[Evan Driscoll]

On 10/04/2012 04:59 PM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
>> why the  "\s{6}+"  is not a regular pattern?
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> Why are you too lazy to do any research before posting a question?
>
Errr... what?

I'm only somewhat familiar with the extra stuff that languages provide 
in their regexs beyond true regular expressions and simple extensions, 
but I was surprised to see the question because I too would have 
expected that to work. (And match any sequence of whitespace characters 
whose length is a multiple of six.) I reskimmed the documentation of the 
re module and didn't see anything that would prohibit it. I looked at 
several of the results of a Google search for the multiple repeat error, 
and didn't really find any explanation beyond "because you can't do it" 
or "here's a regex that works." (Well, OK, I did see a mention of + 
being a possessive quantifier which Python doesn't support. But that 
still doesn't explain why my expectation isn't what happened.)

In what way is that an unreasonable question?

Evan