This package does very unusual things, and you normally don't need it. It helps you use the "regex" package which is a backwards-compatible replacement for re, with additional features and better performance in some situations (and worse performance in others). Normally you can put import regex as re in your .py files and that's all you need.

However, if you want to use regex instead of re across your whole environment, even within 3rd-party libraries, then this package is for you.

Run pip install regex-as-re-globally to install this package. It will create a .pth file in site-packages which modifies sys.modules so that regex is used everywhere instead of re. This changes behavior within the whole python environment.

The wheel files generated are platform and python specific due to the limitations of wheel files, where the relative directory for site-packages needs to be determined at wheel building time, not install time. The directory is dependent on the version of python and the platform you are on.

The site-packages .pth technique is heavily inspired by https://github.com/dougn/coverage_pth and https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201001/running_code_at_python_startup.html Thanks!