[Tutor] Regular Expression help - parsing AppleScript Lists as Strings

[Kent Johnson]

Andrew Wu wrote:

>    pattern3 = '''
>       ^{
>       (
>       %s
>       | {%s}   # Possible to have 1 level of nested lists
>       ,?)*     # Items are comma-delimited, except for the last item
>       }$
>    ''' % (pattern2, pattern2)

The above doesn't allow comma after the first instance of pattern2 and 
it doesn't allow space after either instance. Here is a version that 
passes your tests:

    pattern3 = '''
       ^{
       (
       (%s
       | {%s})   # Possible to have 1 level of nested lists
       ,?\s*)*     # Items are comma-delimited, except for the last item
       }$
    ''' % (pattern2, pattern2)

You might want to look at doing this with pyparsing, I think it will 
make it easier to get the data out vs just recognizing the correct pattern.

Kent

PS Please post in plain text, not HTML.