Elegant solution needed: Data manipulation

[Mark]

"Jason Orendorff" <jason at jorendorff.com> wrote in message  

> I'm a bit surprised you didn't take Steve's code and
> say "Yay, I'm done!".  I'm extra surprised you didn't
> reply to any of the responses to your message or
> ask any followup questions.  Your approach might be
> faster than Steve's (I'm not sure), but it seems a
> bit more fragile.

It had nothing to do with being unappreciative, that's for sure :). 
No, the only real problem with Steve's code was a need to have infix
expressions.  Also, I think I didn't get his message right away b/c of
usenet server update problems.

Anyway, the other motivation for my attempt is that I'm both _using_
and _learning_ python right now.  So, I'm happy to spend a little more
time on a problem so that I can learn some more.

I didn't ask followups b/c I think I saw how the solutions were
working and could figure out how they would work for me (of course, I
could be delusional).

Regards,
Mark