DSLs in perl and python (Was sobering observation)

[Rustom Mody]

On Friday, March 18, 2016 at 4:17:06 AM UTC+5:30, MRAB wrote:
> Stick an "x" on the end of the regex: /something/x or s/old/new/x.

Thanks!

Is there somewhere a regexp 'introspection' API/capability available?

ie if the re looks like
rexp = r"""
# DSL (instantiation) for describing NYSE symbology
^
(?P<scrip>	     [A-Z]*)     # The base scrip
(?P<serchar>	     [.+-])?     # Series type char
(?P<series>	     [A-Z])?     # Series
(?P<issuedc>	     [#])?       # issued char indicator
$		     		 # Thats all (there should be!)
"""

I would like to know that the named-groups are
{scrip, serchar, series, issued}
without doing match/search etc

That way then the same DSL could be used for quite different regexps

IOW I would like to generalize the code:

g = m.group
scrip, serchar, series, issuedc = g('scrip'), g('serchar'), g('series'), g('issuedc')

The scrip, serchar, series etc need not be local vars; 
a dict is fine/preferable