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Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions?

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From	ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram)
Newsgroups	comp.lang.python, alt.fantasy
Subject	Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions?
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Date	26 Sep 2026 12:22:14 GMT
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Cross-posted to 2 groups.

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Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>Thank you.  I'm sure Kent Beck of /eXtreme Programming/ would be proud
>of this regular expression if he bothered to read comp.lang.python.

  That regular expression can be made more readable in Python
  using verbose regular expressions while still avoiding names
  and parentheses within the regular expression.

exp = re.compile(
  r"""
  ^ [+-]? [0-9]+ $                             # Integer (123, -45)
  |
  ^ [+-]? [0-9]+ \. [0-9]+ [eE] [+-]? [0-9]+ $ # Float with "E"
  |
  ^ [+-]? [0-9]+ \. [0-9]+ $                   # Float without "E"
  |
  ^ [+-]? \. [0-9]+ [eE] [+-]? [0-9]+ $        # Starts with ".", has E
  |
  ^ [+-]? \. [0-9]+ $                          # Starts with ".", no "E"
  |
  ^ [+-]? [0-9]+ \. [eE] [+-]? [0-9]+ $        # Ends with ".", has "E"
  |
  ^ [+-]? [0-9]+ \. $                          # Ends with ".", no "E"
  |
  ^ [+-]? [0-9]+ [eE] [+-]? [0-9]+ $           # No ".", but "E"
  """,
  re.VERBOSE,
)

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Pythonic way to combine regular expressions? Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> - 2026-09-26 02:54 +0800
  Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions? ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2026-09-25 19:08 +0000
    Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions? ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2026-09-25 19:19 +0000
  Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions? ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2026-09-26 10:04 +0000
    Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions? Johann 'Myrkraverk' Oskarsson <johann@myrkraverk.invalid> - 2026-09-26 20:09 +0800
      Re: Pythonic way to combine regular expressions? ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) - 2026-09-26 12:22 +0000

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