razrichter / sregex Goto Github PK

HL7 messages often include empty fields, so have consecutive field separators, 
such as "||". A simplified example:

>>> 
list(sres("MSH|^~\&|XY|YZ|||20130821235952|1234567890|DFT^P03|316387|P|2.3||||||
|||", "y/\|/"))

The from_y() function gets confused by the consecutive '|' seperation 
characters and returns this list:
['MSH', '^~\\&', 'XY', 'YZ', '|', '20130821235952', '1234567890', 'DFT^P03', 
'316387', 'P', '2.3', '|', '|', '|', '|', '\n']

Instead, I expect it to return all the fields, including the empty ones, 
without any '|' characters, like this: 
['MSH', '^~\\&', 'XY', 'YZ', '', '', '20130821235952', '1234567890', 'DFT^P03', 
'316387', 'P', '2.3', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '\n']

This can be fixed by removing the test for "if mbegin != begin" in the from_y() 
function and instead always calling "yield (begin, mbegin)" and "begin = mend" 
when there is a match.

However, there must have been some specific reason why you put this test in 
there, so I may be missing some other corner case.

Thanks for this excellent package! -Ross