RE: Correct syntax for pathological re.search()

Peter,

Matthew understood what I was hinting at in one way and you in another.

The question asked how to add some power of two backslashes or make other
changes, so the RE functionality sees what you want. The goal is to see what
happens when one or more intermediate evaluations may change the string.

So, a simple print may suffice as a parallel way to force the same
evaluations.

Thomas made his point. And, I am starting to feel like I need to change my
name to something like Luke since this discussion must be gospel.

FYI, I was not planning on posting at all. Time to detach.


-----Original Message-----
From: Python-list <python-list-bounces+avi.e.gross=gmail.com@python.org> On
Behalf Of Peter J. Holzer via Python-list
Sent: Saturday, October 12, 2024 7:00 AM
To: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: Correct syntax for pathological re.search()

On 2024-10-11 17:13:07 -0400, AVI GROSS via Python-list wrote:

Is there some utility function out there that can be called to show what

the

regular expression you typed in will look like by the time it is ready to

be

used?

I assume that by "ready to be used" you mean the compiled form?

No, there doesn't seem to be a way to dump that. You can

    p = re.compile("\\sout{")
    print(p.pattern)

but that just prints the input string, which you could do without
compiling it first.

But - without having looked at the implementation - it's far from clear
that the compiled form would be useful to the user. It's probably some
kind of state machine, and a large table of state transitions isn't very
readable.

There are a number of websites which visualize regular expressions.
Those are probably better for debugging a regular expression than
anything the re module could reasonably produce (although with the
caveat that such a web site would use a different implementation and
therefore might produce different results).

        hp

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