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Raw string substitution problem

Steven D'Aprano steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au
Fri Dec 18 22:29:32 EST 2009 
On Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:24:00 +0000, MRAB wrote:

> Gregory Ewing wrote:
>> MRAB wrote:
>> 
>>> In simple cases you might be replacing with the same string every
>>> time, but other cases you might want the replacement to contain
>>> substrings captured by the regex.
>> 
>> But you can give it a function that has access to the match object and
>> can produce whatever replacement string it wants.
>> 
>> You already have a complete programming language at your disposal.
>> There's no need to invent yet another mini-language for the replacement
>> string.
>> 
> There's no need for list comprehensions either, but they're much-used
> shorthand.

The same can't be said for regex replacement strings, which are far more 
specialised.

And list comps don't make anything *harder*, they just make things 
easier. In contrast, the current behaviour of regex replacements makes it 
difficult to use special characters as part of the replacement string. 
That's not good.



-- 
Steven
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