parsing in python

[Duncan Booth]

Peter Sprenger <sprenger at moving-bytes.de> wrote in 
news:ca6ep3$8ni$01$1 at news.t-online.com:

> I hope somebody can help me with my problem. I am writing Zope python 
> scripts that will do parsing on text for dynamic webpages: I am getting 
> a text from an oracle database that contains different tags that have to
> be converted to a HTML expression. E.g. "<pic#>" ( # is an integer 
> number) has to be converted to <img src="..."> where the image data 
> comes also from a database table.
> Since strings are immutable, is there an effective way to parse such 
> texts in Python? In the process of finding and converting the embedded 
> tags I also would like to make a word wrap on the generated HTML output 
> to increase the readability of the generated HTML source.
> Can I write an efficient parser in Python or should I extend Python with 
> a C routine that will do this task in O(n)?

You do realise that O(n) says nothing useful about how fast it will run?

Answering your other questions, yes, there are lots of effective ways to 
parse text strings in Python. Were I in your position, I wouldn't even 
consider C until I had demonstrated that the most obvious and clean 
solution wasn't fast enough.

You don't really describe your data in sufficient detail, so I can only 
give general suggestions:

You could use a regular expression replace to convert <pic#> tags with the 
appropriate image tag.

you could use sgmllib to parse the data.

you could use one of Python's many xml parsers to parse the data (provided 
it is valid xml, which it may not be).

you could use the split method on strings to split the data on '<'. Each 
string (other than the first) then begins with a potential tag which you 
can match with the startswith method or a regular expression.

You could replace '<' with '%(' and '>' with ')s' then use the % operator 
to process all the replacements using a class with a custom __getitem__ 
method.

If you want to word wrap and pretty print the HTML, then that is better 
done as a separate pass. Just get a general purpose HTML pretty printer 
(e.g. mxTidy) and call it. That way you can easily turn it off for 
production use if you really are concerned about speed.