[Tutor] newbie search and replace

[Michael Janssen]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Magnus Lycka wrote:

> But this is not the same as a regular expression word boundry.
> A word in RE is a sequence of alphanumeric characters and
> underscore. So, there are other word boundries than whitespace.

[snip]
> Once a problem reaches a certain level of complexity, and I
> think tidying natural language texts are a problem at that
> level, using too simple tools will just lead to very
> complicated, or failing, solutions. (Or both.)
>
> The power of RE means that it takes some time to learn, but
> in many situations, it's worth it.

My first concern was that many global subtitions over a long string would
last a long time. But I know: never optimize your code before the obvious
attempt has proven inefficiency (On a sidenote: my favourite programm
stucks most the runtime computing RE's where perl aequivalents have done
the job already - it's terrible subjective, but I believe python's RE
slow).

Thanks for spotting the details of regular expression's "\b".

Michael

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