On Dec 10, 8:53 am, Noah Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Dec 9, 1:41 pm, John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > A pattern that can validly be described as a "regular expression"
> > cannot count and thus can't match balanced parentheses. Some "RE"
> > engines provide a method of tagging a sub-pattern so that a match must
> > include balanced () (or [] or {}); Python's doesn't.
>
> Okay, thanks for the clarification. So recursion is not possible using
> python regular expressions?
>
> > Ummm ... even if Python's re engine did do what you want, wouldn't you
> > need flags=re.VERBOSE in there?
>
> Ah, thanks for letting me know about that flag; but removing
> whitespace as I did with the no_ws lambda expression should also work,
> no?Under a very limited definition of "work". That technique would not produce correct answers on patterns that contain any *significant* whitespace e.g. you want to match "foo" and "bar" separated by one or more spaces (but not tabs, newlines etc) .... pattern = r""" foo [ ]+ bar """ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
