Raymond Hettinger wrote: > [Guido] > >>Another observation: despite the derogatory remarks about regular >>expressions, they have one thing going for them: they provide a higher >>level of abstraction for string parsing, which this is all about. >>(They are higher level in that you don't have to be counting >>characters, which is about the lowest-level activity in programming -- >>only counting bytes is lower!) >> >>Maybe if we had a *good* way of specifying string parsing we wouldn't >>be needing to call find() or index() so much at all! (A good example >>is the code that Raymond lifted from ConfigParser: a semicolon >>preceded by whitespace starts a comment, other semicolons don't. >>Surely there ought to be a better way to write that.) > > A higher level abstraction is surely the way to go.
I may be missing something, but why invent yet another parsing method - we already have the re module. I'd suggest to use it :-) If re is not fast enough or you want more control over the parsing process, you could also have a look at mxTextTools: http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxTextTools.html -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Aug 28 2005) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: Try mxODBC.Zope.DA for Windows,Linux,Solaris,FreeBSD for free ! :::: _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com