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That is, can I reuse a regular expression crafted in JavaScript verbatim in Python? In doing so, will I get the same results and performance? Enter your languages of interest in place of JavaScript and Python, the question remains the same.
It is a not well kept secret that programmers are huge fans of copying and pasting code snippets, regular expressions included, that are freely available across the web. But unlike copying and pasting code within the boundaries of the same programming language, does copying a regular expression that was crafted in one language into another work as assumed, or would it introduce errors, both semantically and in performance?
"Why Aren’t Regular Expressions a Lingua Franca? An Empirical Study on the Re-use and Portability of Regular Expressions" is a paper that attempts to shed light on the question: are regular expressions truly portable?
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