Brendon> I could do that, or I could do something like the re.* trick Brendon> mentioned by another poster. But, doesn't it offend anyone else Brendon> that the only clean way to access functionality that's already Brendon> in Python is to write long complicated Python code? Python Brendon> already knows how to extract a list object from a string; why Brendon> should I have to rewrite that?
Doesn't bother me at all. One, it's not actually Python code, it's JavaScript. It's just serendipity that the table can be parsed as a Python list. Two, there's nothing to prevent the authors from changing the formatting in an incompatible way in the future. Three, it's completely untrusted input and shouldn't be fed to eval(). Four, it's not actually complicated code (using the csv module would probably be simpler). Had the NASD had a requirement that their HTML pages be easily assimilated into Python I might agree with you. I suspect that wasn't high up on their priority list though. Five, you have to stop thinking of it a "list object". It's just a string of bytes which happens at this point in time to intersect with the definition of a Python list. You're trying to wish it was something that it's not. Skip -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list