Devan L wrote: > John Machin wrote: > >>Aahz wrote: >> >>>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, >>>John Machin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> >>> >>>>Search for r'^something' can never be better/faster than match for >>>>r'something', and with a dopey implementation of search [which Python's >>>>re is NOT] it could be much worse. So please don't tell newbies to >>>>search for r'^something'. >>> >>> >>>You're somehow getting mixed up in thinking that "^" is some kind of >>>"not" operator -- it's the start of line anchor in this context. >> >>I can't imagine where you got that idea from. >> >>If I change "[which Python's re is NOT]" to "[Python's re's search() is >>not dopey]", does that help you? >> >>The point was made in a context where the OP appeared to be reading a >>line at a time and parsing it, and re.compile(r'something').match() >>would do the job; re.compile(r'^something').search() will do the job too >>-- BECAUSE ^ means start of line anchor -- but somewhat redundantly, and >>very inefficiently in the failing case with dopey implementations of >>search() (which apply match() at offsets 0, 1, 2, .....). > > > I don't see much difference.
and I didn't expect that you would -- like I wrote above: "Python's re's search() is not dopey". -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
