On Tue, 13 Jan 2015 04:36:38 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > On Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:48:18 +0000, Ian wrote: > >> My recommendation would be to write a recursive decent parser for your >> files. >> >> That way will be easier to write, > > I know that writing parsers is a solved problem in computer science, and > that doing so is allegedly one of the more trivial things computer > scientists are supposed to be able to do, but the learning curve to > write parsers is if anything even higher than the learning curve to > write a regex. > > I wish that Python made it as easy to use EBNF to write a parser as it > makes to use a regex :-( > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Backus–Naur_Form
I would not say that writing parsers is a solved problem. there may be solutions for a number of specific cases but many cases still cause difficulty, as an example I do not think there is a 100% complete parser for English (even native English speakers don't always get it) -- Keep the number of passes in a compiler to a minimum. -- D. Gries -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list