[issue23532] regex "|" behavior differs from documentation

Rick Otten added the comment: Can the documentation be updated to make this more clear? I see now where the clause "As the target string is scanned, ..." is describing what you have listed here. I and a coworker both read the description several times and missed that. I thought it first trie

[issue23532] regex "|" behavior differs from documentation

Matthew Barnett added the comment: @Mark is correct, it's not a bug. In the first example: It tries to match each alternative at position 0. Failure. It tries to match each alternative at position 1. Failure. It tries to match each alternative at position 2. Failure. It tries to match each alte

[issue23532] regex "|" behavior differs from documentation

Mark Shannon added the comment: This looks like the expected behaviour to me. re.sub matches the leftmost occurence and the regular expression is greedy so (x|xy) will always match xy if it can. -- nosy: +Mark.Shannon ___ Python tracker

[issue23532] regex "|" behavior differs from documentation

New submission from Rick Otten: The documentation states that "|" parsing goes from left to right. This doesn't seem to be true when spaces are involved. (or \s). Example: In [40]: mystring Out[40]: 'rwo incorporated' In [41]: re.sub('incorporated| inc|llc|corporation|corp| co', '', mystrin

[issue23532] regex "|" behavior differs from documentation

Changes by Rick Otten : -- components: Regular Expressions nosy: Rick Otten, ezio.melotti, mrabarnett priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: regex "|" behavior differs from documentation type: behavior versions: Python 2.7 ___ Python tr