In defence of 80-char lines

[Jason Swails]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

> In article <mailman.96.1365077619.3114.python-list at python.org>,
>  Jason Swails <jason.swails at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The only time I regularly break my rule is for regular expressions (at
> some
> > point I may embrace re.X to allow me to break those up, too).
>
> re.X is a pretty cool tool for making huge regexes readable.  But, it
> turns out that python's auto-continuation and string literal
> concatenation rules are enough to let you get much the same effect.
> Here's a regex we use to parse haproxy log files. This would be utter
> line noise all run together. This way, it's almost readable :-)
>
> pattern = re.compile(r'haproxy\[(?P<pid>\d+)]: '
>                      r'(?P<client_ip>(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}):'
>                      r'(?P<client_port>\d{1,5}) '
>

For some reason that never occurred to me.  I use this technique every
other time I want to break up a long string, but never for regexes...

Now I will.  I was wary of using re.X since I sometimes use meaningful
whitespace in my regexes, and I didn't want to have to figure out how to
prevent them from being ignored...  This is a much better solution.

Thanks,
Jason
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