Although you're technically correct, I think there's a knee-jerk anti-regex reaction, citing the meaningless overhead. If you're running many thousands of records or something then it becomes a small issue compared to a replace statement or something. But in most cases it makes no difference at all.
Run the example script both ways and I'm sure there will be no difference, and I prefer a clear regex to a convoluted (in my opinion) substring call. In any case, it's a preference, and I have never seen anything which convinced me that one should avoid regexes at all costs unless there's no other way to do it. And the comment about solving a problem by using regular expressions creating another problem is just asinine. Like so many other things, it's often repeated without any thought about whether it is true in general, much less in the situation in question. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
