[Tutor] Does it helps to learn "Regular Expressions" or ...

[Asrarahmed Kadri]

Thanks a lot, Danny.
Yeah, my goal is to do XML parsing and for that I will be using ElementTree.
As you pointed out, regular expressions are very powerful, so I better get
some idea of about them.

Cheers.
Asrarahmed


On 10/30/06, Danny Yoo <dyoo at hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
>
> > Is it useful to know re module and its functions..??
>
> HI Asrarahmed,
>
> Yes.  Most people find them to be invaluable in their day-to-day work.
> The problem is that they're powerful enough that they look like an
> all-in-one tool: it's tempting to use them, even when they are the wrong
> tool for the job. *grin* So at least know about regular expressions,
> enough to know when and when not to use them.
>
> You might want to look at the Regex HOWTO:
>
>      http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/
>
> to get more familiar with regular expressions.
>
>
>
> > Or the string module has enough utilities to accomplish string
> > manipulation..!!!
>
> For simple things, I'd stick with the methods in strings.  For other
> complicated tasks, regular expressions may be the right tool.  But for
> anything that deals with structure (i.e. HTML, XML, JSON), using a real
> parser for that language is more appropriate.  (Those parsers will usually
> be built on top of regular expressions, to hide some ugliness from you.)
>
> Concretely, if anyone asks you to if they can use regular expressions to
> parse XML, try to convince them to look into the ElementTree library
> first.
>
>
> Good luck!
>



-- 
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