Asking for advice: Using Python for data validation

[David Mitchell]

Assuming the data is plain text, then any language with regular expressions
should work pretty well.  Python should be fine, and use the 're' module to
get regular expression parsing capability.  I've done lots of this sort of
work with Perl in the past, so I know Perl is also pretty well suited to
this type of task.

If the data's XML (I know you said "plain ascii text"...), then you'd want a
language and/or module that understands XML-formatted data.  Again Python
should be just fine.