Regular expressions
You know what's really hard to do using object-oriented principles? Parsing strings to match arbitrary patterns, that's what. There have been a fair number of academic papers written in which object-oriented design is used to set up string-parsing, but the results seem too verbose and hard to read, and they are not widely used in practice.
In the real world, string-parsing in most programming languages is handled by regular expressions. These are not verbose, but, wow, are they ever hard to read, at least until you learn the syntax. Even though regular expressions are not object-oriented, the Python regular expression library provides a few classes and objects that you can use to construct and run regular expressions.
While we use regular expressions to "match" a string, this is only a partial description of what a regular expression really is. It can help to think of a regular expression as a mathematical rule that could generate a...
