Parsing of a file

[Stefan Behnel]

Shawn Milochik wrote:
>> I would like to parse this file by extracting the field id, ra, dec and mjd
>> for each line. It is
>> not, however, certain that the width of each value of the field id, ra, dec
>> or mjd is the same
>> in each line. Is there a way to do this such that even if there was a line
> 
> Regular expressions will do the trick nicely.
> 
>> where Ra=****** and
>> MJD=******** was swapped it would be parsed correctly?
>>
> 
> Yes, but you'll probably have to look at each line three times or
> split it into a list and check the elements.

You can use named groups in a single regular expression.

Stefan