[Zope-dev] regex vs. re

[Jim Fulton]

"Phillip J. Eby" wrote:
> 
> Why do DocumentTemplates and ZPublisher use regex instead of re? 

Two reasons:

  1. Speed: regex is substantially faster than re

  2. Intertia: we expect to change eventually, especially
     after re is optimized.

> Since re
> is thread-safe and regex isn't, wouldn't it make sense to move things in
> the 're' direction? 

regex can be used in thread-safe ways.  AFAIK, all of the uses in 
DocumentTemplate and ZPublisher are thread safe.

We are going through the rest of the Zope code to check for
non-thread-safe uses of regex, regsub, and mutable "static"
variables (e.g. global variables and function defaults).

> Or is Python 1.4 still being supported for these
> packages?

No.
 
> One reason I ask is that I'm about to begin using regular expression in
> ZPublished code, and I'm wondering whether there's some special reason I
> should use regex instead of re.  (Aside from the fact that it would mean
> not loading two different regular expression libraries, of course.  :) )

I don't have a strong opinion on this.  Switching from regex to re is 
not very high on our priority list.

Jim

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