--- lothar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > a non-greedy match is implicitly defined in the documentation to be > one such > that there is no proper substring in the return which could also > match the regex. >
If I understand this correctly, what you are asking is for re to look for, or rather, anticipate, over-lapping matches (e.g. tags nested inside tags). But the module documentation at "4.2.3 Module Contents" specifically states that functions like re.findall do not do this. So I think it's not that the regex engine is not up to the task - rather that you may need to take into account the behaviour of some of the module functions when composing your regexes. I'm sure it's possible to do what you want using a regex alone - however, it may also be worth looking at rolling your own search functions in order to get finer control over the strategy of searching. John Ridley Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list