Need better string methods

[Christian Tismer]

William Park wrote:

> Christian Tismer <tismer at stackless.com> wrote:
> 
>>William Park wrote:
>>
>>>Both Bash shell and Python can split based on regular expression.
>>>However, shell is not a bad alternative here:
>>>    tr -s ' \t' ' ' | sed -e 's/ ?| ?/|/g' -e 's/^ //' -e 's/ $//' |
>>>    while IFS='|' read -a clean; do
>>>      ...
>>>    done
>>
>>But isn't that regex expression much harder to understand
>>for part-time programmers than the few Python methods?
> 
> 
> But, OP's audience is not part-time programmers.  My guess is that they
> immediately abandon shell and jump to proprietary languages.  OP may
> have better luck if they stick with shell a bit longer, and then jump to
> Python as last resort.  

I have no idea what OP is.

> As for regex... it's usually easier to set up the data to be cut,
> instead of cutting first and then patching up the pieces.

Why? One big, undecipherable regex is better than a stepwise
reduction of the problem? Not mentioning that the latter is
probably faster, but...
Can you enlighten me why you think you can claim that,
or is this going to become a thread like "PHP is better
than Python for web/database stuff"?

yes-I-meant-to-be-friendly -- chris

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