The Regex Story

[Paul Rubin]

Steven D'Aprano <steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au> writes:
> One disadvantage is that you have to learn an entire new language, a 
> language which is painfully terse and obfuscated, with virtually no 
> support for debugging. Larry Wall has criticised the Perl regex syntax on 
> a number of grounds: ...

There is a parser combinator library for Python called Pyparsing but it
is apparently dog slow.  Maybe someone can do a faster one sometime.  
See: http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/ for info.  I haven't used it,
but it is apparently similar in style to Parsec (a Haskell library):

  http://research.microsoft.com/users/daan/download/papers/parsec-paper.pdf 

I use Parsec sometimes, and it's much nicer than complicated regexps.
There is a version called Attoparsec now that is slightly less powerful
but very fast.