On Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:01:57 +0100, Thorsten Kampe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > > It's originally from Jamie Zawinski: > 'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use > regular expressions." Now they have two problems.' > > And the simple reason why Regular Expressions are not a part of the > core Python language is that Regular Expressions are overrated.
It seems to me they are currently /underrated/ in the Python community. Or, I suspect, everybody disrespects them in public but secretly use them when they're hacking ;-) > They are simply not the preferred tool for every kind of text manipulation > and extraction. Oh yes, agreed there. str.split, str.startswith, substr in str ... take you a long way without a single backslash. I use them more frequently these days; for example, I would have solved the original poster's problem in that way. However, there is a set of common problems which would be hell to solve without regexes. I used to do that stuff in C when I was young and stupid; now would never go back to hand-coded, buggy loops just for the sake of avoiding regexes. Possibly I have more need of regexes than some others, because I do a lot of traditional Unix programming, which is heavy on text processing and text-based mini-languages. /Jorgen -- // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@ Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu \X/ snipabacken.dyndns.org> R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list