[Python-Dev] Remove str.find in 3.0?

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Sun Aug 28 15:10:14 CEST 2005


Raymond Hettinger wrote:
> [Guido]
> 
>>Another observation: despite the derogatory remarks about regular
>>expressions, they have one thing going for them: they provide a higher
>>level of abstraction for string parsing, which this is all about.
>>(They are higher level in that you don't have to be counting
>>characters, which is about the lowest-level activity in programming --
>>only counting bytes is lower!)
>>
>>Maybe if we had a *good* way of specifying string parsing we wouldn't
>>be needing to call find() or index() so much at all! (A good example
>>is the code that Raymond lifted from ConfigParser: a semicolon
>>preceded by whitespace starts a comment, other semicolons don't.
>>Surely there ought to be a better way to write that.)
>  
> A higher level abstraction is surely the way to go.

I may be missing something, but why invent yet another parsing
method - we already have the re module. I'd suggest to
use it :-)

If re is not fast enough or you want more control over the
parsing process, you could also have a look at mxTextTools:

    http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxTextTools.html

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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>>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ...        http://python.egenix.com/
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