Fredrik Lundh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > that's not a very efficient way to match multiple patterns, though. a > much better way is to combine the patterns into a single one, and use > the "lastindex" attribute to figure out which one that matched.
lastindex is useful, yes. > see > > http://effbot.org/zone/xml-scanner.htm > > for more on this topic. I take your point. However I don't find the below very readable - making 5 small regexps into 1 big one, plus a game of count the brackets doesn't strike me as a huge win... xml = re.compile(r""" <([/?!]?\w+) # 1. tags |&(\#?\w+); # 2. entities |([^<>&'\"=\s]+) # 3. text strings (no special characters) |(\s+) # 4. whitespace |(.) # 5. special characters """, re.VERBOSE) Its probably faster though, so I give in gracelessly ;-) -- Nick Craig-Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
