Comparison of parsers in python?

Peng Yu pengyu.ut at gmail.com
Sun Sep 20 08:11:50 EDT 2009


On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 6:50 AM, andrew cooke <andrew at acooke.org> wrote:
> On Sep 19, 9:34 pm, Peng Yu <pengyu... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sep 19, 6:05 pm, Robert Kern <robert.k... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >http://nedbatchelder.com/text/python-parsers.html
>>
>> This is more a less just a list of parsers. I would like some detailed
>> guidelines on which one to choose for various parsing problems.
>
> it would be simpler if you described what you want to do - parsers can
> be used for a lot of problems.

I have never used any parser. The task at my hand right now is to
parse this http://genome.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/help/wiggle.html, which
is a fairly simple even without any parser package.

I think that it is worthwhile for me to learn some parser packages to
try to parse this format. So that I may in future parse more complex
syntax. Do you have any suggestion what parser I should use for now?

Regards,
Peng

> also, the parsers do not exist in isolation - you need to worry about
> whether they are supported, how good the documentation is, etc.
>
> and different parsers handle different grammars - see
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/LanguageParsing - so if you already have a
> particular grammar then your life is simpler if you choose a parser
> that matches.
>
>
> these are the three that i know most about - i think all three are
> currently maintained:
>
> for simple parsing problems, i think pyparsing is the most commonly
> used - http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/
>
> my own lepl - http://www.acooke.org/lepl/ - tries to combine ease of
> use with some more advanced features
>
> the nltk - http://www.nltk.org/ - is particularly targeted at parsing
> natural languages and includes a wide variety of tools.
>
>
> but for parsing a large project you might be better interfacing to a
> compiled parser (lepl has memoisation, so should scale quite well, but
> it's not something i've looked at in detail yet).
>
> andrew
> --
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>



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