regular expressions ... slow

[Jerry Hill]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 4:37 PM, Uwe Schmitt
<rocksportrocker at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is anobody aware of this post:  http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html ?

Yes, it's been brought up here, on python-dev and python-ideas several
times in the past year and a half.

> Are there any plans  to speed up Pythons regular expression module ?
> Or
> is the example in this artricle too far from reality ???

I don't think anyone has taken any concrete steps towards re-writing
the regular expression module.  My understanding from previous threads
on the topic is that the core developers would be willing to accept a
re-written regular expression engine, but none of them are interested
in doing it themselves.  The general consensus seemed to be that the
pathological cases hilited in that article are not very common in the
real world, and that simply switching to the alternative approach
advocated there would require giving up things like backreferences
that are actually used in the real world, which is probably
unacceptable.

Some references:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2007-March/072241.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2007-February/427604.html
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2007-April/000405.html

Personally, I know very little about the nitty gritty of regular
expression engines, but there's some reference material for you to
chew on.

-- 
Jerry