When I ran into the issue of the re module not exposing its types , I considered several solutions to my underlyingproblem of distinguishing strings from compiled regular expressions.For various reasons, I wound up picking the solution that was the leastannoying to code; I decided whether something was compiled regularexpression by checking to see if it had a .match attribute.

This is the traditional Python approach to the problem; don't checktypes as such, just check to see if the object has the behavior thatyou'

Here is a note to myself about shell scripting, especially things that Iwrite on the fly on the command line: under no circumstance should I useany ' for ... ' loop index variable apart from $i .

I say this because, based on experimental evidence so far, I amcompletely sure to use $i in the body of the for loop, no matterwhat sensible variable name I picked as the loop index in the for statement. And, of course, the Bourne shell will let me