Whittle it on down

[Stephen Hansen]

On Thu, May 5, 2016, at 11:03 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> - Nobody could possibly want to support non-ASCII text. (Apart from the
> approximately 6.5 billion people in the world that don't speak English of
> course, an utterly insignificant majority.)

Oh, I'd absolutely want to support non-ASCII text. If I have unicode
input, though, I unfortunately have to rely on
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex as 're' doesn't support matching on
character properties. 

I keep hoping it'll replace "re", then we could do:

pattern = regex.compile(ru"^\p{Lu}\s&]+$")

where \p{property} matches against character properties in the unicode
database.

> - Data validity doesn't matter, because there's no possible way that you
> might accidentally scrape data from the wrong part of a HTML file and end
> up with junk input.

Um, no one said that. I was arguing that the *regular expression*
doesn't need to be responsible for validation.

> - Even if you do somehow end up with junk, there couldn't possibly be any
> real consequences to that.

No one said that either...

> - It doesn't matter if you match too much, or to little, that just means
> the
> specs are too pedantic.

Or that...

-- 
Stephen Hansen
  m e @ i x o k a i . i o