Re: a little parsing challenge ☺

[jmfauth]

On 19 juil, 21:09, Terry Reedy <tjre... at udel.edu> wrote:
> On 7/19/2011 2:12 PM, Xah Lee wrote:
>
> >> Also, you may have answered this earlier but I'll ask again anyways: You
> >> ask for the first mismatched pair, Are you referring to the inner most
> >> mismatched, or the outermost?  For example, suppose you have this file:
>
> >> foo[(])bar
>
> >> Would the "(" be the first mismatched character or would the "]"?
>
> > yes i haven't been precise. Thanks for brining it up.
>
> > thinking about it now, i think it's a bit hard to define precisely.
>
> Then it is hard to code precisely.
>

Not really. The trick is to count the different opener/closer
separately.
That is what I am doing to check balanced brackets in
chemical formulas. The rules are howerver not the same
as in math.

Interestingly, I fall on this "problem". enumerate() is very
nice to parse a string from left to right.

>>> for i, c in enumerate('abcd'):
...     print i, c
...
0 a
1 b
2 c
3 d
>>>

But, if I want to parse a string from right to left,
what's the trick?
The best I found so far:

>>> s = 'abcd'
>>> for i, c in enumerate(reversed(s)):
...     print len(s) - 1 - i, c
...
3 d
2 c
1 b
0 a
>>>