> That's a little harsh -- regexes have their place, together with pointer > arithmetic, bit manipulations, reverse polish notation and goto. The > problem is when people use them inappropriately e.g. using a regex when a > simple string.find will do. > > > A quote attributed variously to > > Tim Peters and Jamie Zawinski says "Some people, when confronted with a > > problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two > > problems." > > I believe that is correctly attributed to Jamie Zawinski. > > -- > Steven
So as a newbie, I have to ask. I've played with the re module now for a while, I think regular expressions are super fun and useful. As far as them being a problem I found they can be tricky and sometimes the regex's I've devised do unexpected things...(which I can think of two instances where that unexpected thing was something that I had hoped to get into further down the line, yay for me!). So I guess I don't really understand why they are a "bad idea" to use. I don't know of any other way yet to parse specific data out of a text, html, or xml file without resorting to regular expressions. What other ways are there? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list