From 9e670c216164bd9e437ffefeba31fb0a7865b932 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mark Summerfield Date: Sat, 31 May 2008 13:05:34 +0000 Subject: Added a note to [] that special forms & special chars lose their meaning and backrefs can't be used inside [] --- Doc/library/re.rst | 6 ++++++ 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+) diff --git a/Doc/library/re.rst b/Doc/library/re.rst index 707eedf..5831364 100644 --- a/Doc/library/re.rst +++ b/Doc/library/re.rst @@ -181,6 +181,12 @@ The special characters are: ``[^5]`` will match any character except ``'5'``, and ``[^^]`` will match any character except ``'^'``. + Note that inside ``[]`` the special forms and special characters lose + their meanings and only the syntaxes described here are valid. For + example, ``+``, ``*``, ``(``, ``)``, and so on are treated as + literals inside ``[]``, and backreferences cannot be used inside + ``[]``. + ``'|'`` ``A|B``, where A and B can be arbitrary REs, creates a regular expression that will match either A or B. An arbitrary number of REs can be separated by the -- cgit v0.12