[Docutils-develop] nested inline markup and grouping

[David A. <da...@bo...>]

Dave G. recently expressed some concern about the nested markup
patch, since he discovered that there's an internal limit on regex
groups:

  >>> re.compile('(.)'*500)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/sre.py", line 179, in compile
      return _compile(pattern, flags)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/sre.py", line 227, in _compile
      p = sre_compile.compile(pattern, flags)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.3/sre_compile.py", line 474, in compile
      assert p.pattern.groups <= 100,\
  AssertionError: sorry, but this version only supports 100 named
  groups

I just did some little experiments and it appears that the limits on
named groups won't be a problem for the nested markup patch, because
we can use a fixed number of named groups and use unnamed groups for
the rest:

  >>> re.compile('(?:.)'*500)
  <_sre.SRE_Pattern object at 0xa154450>

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com