I was wondering if there would be any interest in extending the struct.unpack format notation to be able to express groups of data with parenthesis.

For example:

...

...

...

data = struct.pack('iiii', 1, 2, 3, 4) struct.unpack('i(ii)i', data) # Note the parentheses (1, (2, 3), 4)

Use Case: I have a program written in C that contains a bunch of aggregate data structures (arrays of structs, structs containing arrays, etc.) and I'm transmitting these structures over a socket connection to a Python program that then unpacks the data using the struct module. Problem is that I have to unpack the incoming data as a flat sequence of data elements, and then repartition the sequence into nested sequences to better reflect how the data is structured in the C program. It would be more convenient to express these groupings as I'm unpacking the raw data.

I'm sure there are plenty of other use cases for such a feature.

This is a reasonable suggestion. You should also be able to write things like '4(ii)' which would be equivalent to '(ii)(ii)(ii)(ii)'. Please use SourceForge to upload a patch. Without a patch nobody is going to be interested though, I suspect, so don't wait for someone else to implement this. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

I was wondering if there would be any interest in extending the struct.unpack format notation to be able to express groups of data with parenthesis.

For example:

...

...

...

data = struct.pack('iiii', 1, 2, 3, 4) struct.unpack('i(ii)i', data) # Note the parentheses (1, (2, 3), 4)

Use Case: I have a program written in C that contains a bunch of aggregate data structures (arrays of structs, structs containing arrays, etc.) and I'm transmitting these structures over a socket connection to a Python program that then unpacks the data using the struct module. Problem is that I have to unpack the incoming data as a flat sequence of data elements, and then repartition the sequence into nested sequences to better reflect how the data is structured in the C program. It would be more convenient to express these groupings as I'm unpacking the raw data.

I'm sure there are plenty of other use cases for such a feature.

This is a reasonable suggestion. You should also be able to write things like '4(ii)' which would be equivalent to '(ii)(ii)(ii)(ii)'. Please use SourceForge to upload a patch. Without a patch nobody is going to be interested though, I suspect, so don't wait for someone else to implement this. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)