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)
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