On Feb 12, 3:35 am, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > That's a little harsh -- regexes have their place, together with pointer > > arithmetic, bit manipulations, reverse polish notation and goto. The > > problem is when people use them inappropriately e.g. using a regex when a > > simple string.find will do. > > > > A quote attributed variously to > > > Tim Peters and Jamie Zawinski says "Some people, when confronted with a > > > problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two > > > problems." > > > I believe that is correctly attributed to Jamie Zawinski. > > > -- > > Steven > > So as a newbie, I have to ask. I've played with the re module now for > a while, I think regular expressions are super fun and useful. As far > as them being a problem I found they can be tricky and sometimes the > regex's I've devised do unexpected things...(which I can think of two > instances where that unexpected thing was something that I had hoped > to get into further down the line, yay for me!). So I guess I don't > really understand why they are a "bad idea" to use.
Regexes are not "bad". However people tend to overuse them, whether they are overkill (like Gabriel's date-splitting example) or underkill -- see your next sentence :-) > I don't know of > any other way yet to parse specific data out of a text, html, or xml > file without resorting to regular expressions. > What other ways are there? Text: Paul Maguire's pyparsing module (Google is your friend); read David Mertz's book on text processing with Python (free download, I believe); modules for specific data formats e.g. csv HTML: htmllib and HTMLParser (both in the Python library), BeautifulSoup (again GIYF) XML: xml.* in the Python library. ElementTree (recommended) is included in Python 2.5; use xml.etree.cElementTree. HTH, John -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list