Difference in `parse` and `search`

I know that parse.search should be used to match a pattern at any position in the string whereas parse.parse has to match the string exactly.

The following issue came up some days ago in the radish project: https://github.com/radish-bdd/radish/issues/106 Especially this comment might be interesting: https://github.com/radish-bdd/radish/issues/106#issuecomment-299503624

However, this gives as interesting outcome:

>>> patt = parse.compile('I have a {}')
>>> patt.search('I have a apple')
<Result ('a',) {}>
>>> patt.parse('I have a apple')
<Result ('apple',) {}>

and

>>> patt = parse.compile('I {} a {}')
>>> patt.parse('I have a apple')
<Result ('have', 'apple') {}>
>>> patt.search('I have a apple')
<Result ('have', 'a') {}>

As you can see search and parse are giving different results. In this example it indeed be possible to just use parse - but in a lot of cases we use this library for is not.

Is this intended behavior?

Adding @rscrimojr

[r1chardj0n3s]

I’ve not had a chance to investigate.

On 7 May 2017 at 18:41, Timo Furrer [e-mail] wrote:

Any idea what the problem could be?

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[r1chardj0n3s]

The lazy match is often necessary so parse will match the minimum necessary to match the string. In hindsight, saying that the example provided is buggy was incorrect of me - it’s doing exactly what was requested (ambiguously) of it. The library has no way to know how long the second element should be when searching through a text for a match (where the text could be very long indeed). I think I’m going to close this because there’s really no action I believe I can take.