--- lothar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > no - in the non-greedy regex > <1st-pat><not-1st-pat>*?<follow-pat> > > <1st-pat>, <not-1st-pat> and <follow-pat> are arbitrarily complex > patterns.
Could you post some real-world examples of the problems you are trying to deal with, please? Trying to come up with general solutions for arbitrarily complex patterns is a bit to hard for me :) > with character classes and negative character classes you do not need > non-greediness anyway. And yet in the simple case you supplied it does make a difference: >>> newdoc = "V1WVVV2WWW" >>> vwre = re.compile("V[^V]*W") ['V1W', 'V2WWW'] >>> vwre = re.compile("V[^V]*?W") >>> vwre.findall(newdoc) ['V1W', 'V2W'] Not exactly rocket-science, but it gets the job done... John Ridley Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list