How do you translate this regular-expression idiom from Perl into Python?

Question

I switched from Perl to Python about a year ago and haven\'t looked back. There is only one idiom that I\'ve ever found I can do more easily in Perl than in Python:<

Answer 1

Using named groups and a dispatch table:

r = re.compile(r'(?Pfoo|bar|baz)(?P.+)')

def do_foo(data):
    ...

def do_bar(data):
    ...

def do_baz(data):
    ...

dispatch = {
    'foo': do_foo,
    'bar': do_bar,
    'baz': do_baz,
}


m = r.match(var)
if m:
    dispatch[m.group('cmd')](m.group('data'))

With a little bit of introspection you can auto-generate the regexp and the dispatch table.