Commit fd714aa3 authored by Martin v. Löwis's avatar Martin v. Löwis

Patch #731514: Update recursion documentation to mention simple recursion.

parent bdf83798
......@@ -896,15 +896,16 @@ The equivalent regular expression would be
(\S+) - (\d+) errors, (\d+) warnings
\end{verbatim}
\leftline{\strong{Avoiding backtracking}}
\leftline{\strong{Avoiding recursion}}
If you create regular expressions that require the engine to perform a lot
of backtracking, you may encounter a RuntimeError exception with the message
\code{maximum recursion limit exceeded}. For example,
If you create regular expressions that require the engine to perform a
lot of recursion, you may encounter a RuntimeError exception with
the message \code{maximum recursion limit} exceeded. For example,
\begin{verbatim}
>>> s = "<" + "that's a very big string!"*1000 + ">"
>>> re.match('<.*?>', s)
>>> import re
>>> s = 'Begin ' + 1000*'a very long string ' + 'end'
>>> re.match('Begin (\w| )*? end', s).end()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/sre.py", line 132, in match
......@@ -912,8 +913,10 @@ Traceback (most recent call last):
RuntimeError: maximum recursion limit exceeded
\end{verbatim}
You can often restructure your regular expression to avoid backtracking.
The above regular expression can be recast as
\regexp{\textless[\textasciicircum \textgreater]*\textgreater}. As a
further benefit, such regular expressions will run faster than their
backtracking equivalents.
You can often restructure your regular expression to avoid recursion.
\versionadded[Simple uses of the \regexp{*?} pattern are now
special-cased to avoid recursion. Thus, the above regular expression
can avoid recursion by being recast as \regexp{Begin [a-zA-Z0-9_ ]*?end}.
As a further benefit, such regular expressions will run faster than
their recursive equivalents.]{2.3}
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