[Tutor] newbie: Reading text file

[Kent Johnson]

Grant Hagstrom wrote:

> Thanks for the links. I'll check them out. You don't happen to have any 
> parsing tutorials bookmarked somewhere do you? I'm already exploring 
> http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/. It's pretty heavy though.

For general text processing, you might want to browse the Text section 
of the Python Cookbook, either the printed version or online:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python?kwd=Text

Many text processing problems can be solved with the string methods or 
regular expressions and a simple state machine.
http://docs.python.org/lib/string-methods.html
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/

If the data structure is recursive or the number of possible states is 
more than a handful, you may want to use a parsing package. I recommend 
looking at at pyparsing or PLY. I have found both of them to be well 
documented and pretty easy to use. Links to these and many other Python 
parser packages here:
http://www.nedbatchelder.com/text/python-parsers.html

Kent

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