Why my Python regular expression pattern run so slowly?

Question

Please see my regular expression pattern code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding:utf-8 -*-

import re

print 'Start'
str1 = 'abcdefgasdsdfswossdfasdaef'
m = re.match(r"([A-Za-z\-\s\:\.]+)+(\d+)\w+", str1) # Want to match something like 'Moto 360x'
print m # None is expected.
print 'Done'

It takes 49 seconds to finish, any problem with the pattern?

Answer 1

See Runaway Regular Expressions: Catastrophic Backtracking .

In brief, if there are extremely many combinations a substring can be split into the parts of the regex, the regex matcher may end up trying them all.

Constructs like (x+)+ and x+x+ practically guarantee this behaviour.

To detect and fix the problematic constructs, the following concept can be used:

• At conceptual level, the presence of a problematic construct means that your regex is ambiguous - ie if you disregard greedy/lazy behaviour, there's no single "correct" split of some text into the parts of the regex (or, equivalently, a subexpression thereof). So, to avoid/fix the problems, you need to see and eliminate all ambiguities.

  • One way to do this is to

    • always split the text into its meaningful parts (=parts that have separate meanings for the task at hand), and
    • define the parts in such a way that they cannot be confused (=using the same characteristics that you yourself would use to tell which is which if you were parsing it by hand)

Answer 2

Just repost the answer and solution in comments from nhahtdh and Marc B:

([A-Za-z\\-\\s\\:\\.]+)+ --> [A-Za-z\\-\\s\\:\\.]+

Thanks so much to nhahtdh and Marc B!