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That might work.
To avoid the overhead of the cache lookup I was thinking about something like
regex = None
def _has_surrogates(s):
 global regex
 if regex is None:
 regex = re.compile(short_regex)
 return regex.search(s)
but I have discarded it because it's not very pretty and still has the overhead of the function and an additional if. Your version solves both the problems in a more elegant way.