Whittle it on down

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, 5 May 2016 11:13 pm, Random832 wrote:

> On Thu, May 5, 2016, at 04:41, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> > There's no situation where "&&&&&" and "     " will exist in the given
>> > dataset, and recognizing that is important. You don't have to account
>> > for every bit of nonsense.
>> 
>> Whenever a programmer says "This case will never happen", ten thousand
>> computers crash.
> 
> What crash can including such an entry in the output list cause?

How do I know? It depends what you do with that list.

But if you assume that your list contains alphabetical strings, and pass it
on to code that expects alphabetical strings, why is it so hard to believe
that it might choke when it receives a non-alphabetical string?


> Should the regex also ensure that the data only includes *english words*
> separated by space-ampersand-space?

That wasn't part of the specification. But for some applications, yes, you
should ensure the data includes only English words.



-- 
Steven