Regular Expressions - Python vs Perl

[Ville Vainio]

>>>>> "Ilpo" == Ilpo Nyyssönen <iny> writes:

    Ilpo> James Stroud <jstroud at mbi.ucla.edu> writes:

    >> Is it relevant that Python can produce compiled expressions? I
    >> don't think that there is such a thing with Perl.

    Ilpo> The problem in python here is that it needs to always
    Ilpo> recompile the regexp. I would like to have a way to write a
    Ilpo> regexp as a constant and then python should compile that
    Ilpo> regexp to the byte-code file.

    Ilpo> This is a problem when one has a big amount of regexps. One
    Ilpo> example is the xmlproc parser in PyXML,

Read the source for sre.py, esp. _compile. The compiled regexps are
cached, so when you invoke e.g. re.match(), it doesn't recompile the
regexp.

So this point is moot, and perl's approach is excessive special
casing.

-- 
Ville Vainio   http://tinyurl.com/2prnb