[Jython-users] Accessing Jython Regular Expressions from java

[Guy Gascoigne-P. <gg...@tr...>]

OK, so I was happily just using the oromatcher Perl5Compiler() routines to
handle python style regular expressions in my java code.  Basically the
regular expressions get passed from the jython script through to a java
function of mine and I wanted to handle them in a python compatible way.  It
turns out that I wasn't completely correct.
 
I got code that actually worked pretty well until I started passing
expressions such as this to it:
 
"(source filename|Name of).*\?(?i)"
 
The gotcha is the (?i) bit at the end, this generates a mismatched
parenthesis error.
 
Now after a lot of delving I've discovered that jython actually uses a
completely different regular expression library - the one in the sre module.
My question is, since this is all python code, is there any way that I can
just call out to this from java? It appears to me that by moving over to a
python implementation here I can't use the same stuff - so far I've found
one incompatibility between the two implementations, and I'm concerned that
I'll run into others.
 
Am I stuck with pre-processing the regular expressions and handling the (?i)
construct myself - I can't believe that's all that there is to it.
 
Any other alternatives?
 
As an aside, why the switch to sre?  Faster?  Better Python compatibility?
 
Thanks - Guy