Question regarding re module

[Tomohiro Kusumi]

Hi,

I have a question regarding re module.
# By the way I'm not in this list, so I'm sorry but please CC me.

I tried following code in Python shell using a regular expression.
Why doesn't the result of dir(reg) have 'pattern', 'flags', and
'groupindex' although they exist as members of _sre.SRE_Pattern
instance ?

It sort of irritates me, because whenever I write Python code
using a module which I'm not used to using, I often try Python
shell with TAB complete to find out the member of module/instance.

Tomohiro Kusumi

-------------------------------------------------
Python 2.5 (r25:51908, May 16 2008, 13:41:55)
[GCC 4.1.2 20070626 (Red Hat 4.1.2-14)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>import re
reg = re.compile(r"[0-9]+")
reg.pattern

'[0-9]+'

>>reg.flags

0

>>reg.groupindex

{}

>>dir(reg)

['__copy__', '__deepcopy__', 'findall', 'finditer', 'match', 'scanner',
'search', 'split', 'sub', 'subn']

>>reg.<TAB>

reg.__copy__ reg.finditer reg.search reg.subn
reg.__deepcopy__ reg.match reg.split
reg.findall reg.scanner reg.sub

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Tomohiro Kusumi schrieb:

Hi,

I have a question regarding re module.
# By the way I'm not in this list, so I'm sorry but please CC me.

I tried following code in Python shell using a regular expression.
Why doesn't the result of dir(reg) have 'pattern', 'flags', and
'groupindex' although they exist as members of _sre.SRE_Pattern
instance ?

It sort of irritates me, because whenever I write Python code
using a module which I'm not used to using, I often try Python
shell with TAB complete to find out the member of module/instance.

It could be that the result overloads the __getattr__-method to delegate
calls to some object. Thus it's not part of the outer instance.

Diez