[Tutor] Regular Expression guru saught

[Sean 'Shaleh' Perry]

On Monday 04 August 2003 11:01, Jeff Shannon wrote:
> Kirk Bailey wrote:
> > This thing is just flat going to need a lot of re stuff, and I need
> > therefore to ome up to speed on re.
>
> I'm not so sure that re's are quite what you want -- or at least, I'm
> not sure if re's are enough.
>
> The problem with re's is that they're not very good at handling nested
> data structures.  It's often mentioned that re's are not appropriate for
> parsing HTML or XML because of this limitation, and I suspect that the
> same will apply to parsing your simple wiki code as well.  You could
> perhaps write re's that will handle the majority of likely cases, but
> (if I'm right) it's almost assured that eventually, someone will write a
> wiki page that can't be properly parsed with a re-based approach.
>

Indeed.  The book "Text Processing in Python" may be of value here.  Covers 
simple string methods, re's and real parsers.  For me it turned out to cover 
mostly stuff I already knew but for someone just getting into text processing 
it is likely to be pretty valuable.

Beyond that, Kirk as always an example is worth a thousand threads (-: