On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:05 PM, MRAB <pyt...@mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote: >> And yeah, even something as crazy as ()* works, but as soon as it >> becomes (a*)* it doesn't work. Weird. >> > I think it's a combination of warning the user about something that's > pointless, > as in the case of "$*", and producing a pattern which could cause the > internal > regex engine to get stuck in an infinite loop.
Considering that ()* works fine, I can't imagine it ever gets stuck in infinite loops. But I admit I am too lazy to check against the interpreter. Also, complete failure is an exceptionally (heh) poor way of warning people about stuff. I hope that's not really it. -- Devin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
