Regex on Part pins causes confusion

When referring to pins by name, the regex interpretation causes confusion. I find it much clearer to refer to pins by name, rather than number. Is there a way of getting an exact match?

For example trying this part:

from skidl import *

j1 = Part('conn', 'USB_OTG')
print j1
print
print j1['D+']

As you can see, “D+” actually matches 5 pins!

 USB_OTG (): USB mini/micro connector
    Pin J1/1/VBUS/POWER-IN
    Pin J1/2/D-/PASSIVE
    Pin J1/3/D+/PASSIVE
    Pin J1/4/ID/PASSIVE
    Pin J1/5/GND/POWER-IN
    Pin J1/6/Shield/PASSIVE

[Pin J1/2/D-/PASSIVE, Pin J1/3/D+/PASSIVE, Pin J1/4/ID/PASSIVE, Pin J1/5/GND/POWER-IN, Pin J1/6/Shield/PASSIVE]

Yeah, I know I can write:

j1['^D\+$']

But that loses a lot of the clarity that I’m hoping to get from using SKiDL

[chenz]

IMO, the change should be intrusive - i.e. regexp matching should only be used through dedicated “search” APIs, and name lookups should be implemented using simple string comparison or even dictionary lookups.

I only use name matching interactively from a repl when initially searching for stuff. From my code, I only ever want to look up a pin/part by it’s exact known name.

Implementing search and name-based getters separately also yields big performance gains when actually doing library searches, because the library loading code constantly checks if a part is already known by name… I experimented with this when initially checking out skidl, because searching the KiCAD library would take several minutes with python2 (with python3, it was quite a bit faster, but still too slow for interactive use). With string comparions, even with linear search it was then orders of magnitude faster (runtime was then bound by the shlex tokenizer).

[xesscorp]

I posted something about this issue on the forum.