Is there a better way of doing this?

[Duncan Booth]

Michael wrote:

> I'm fairly new at Python, and have the following code that works but
> isn't very concise, is there a better way of writing it?? It seems
> much more lengthy than python code i have read..... :-)
> (takes a C++ block and extracts the namespaces from it)

Yes, there is a better way to write the code, but I'm afraid that the 
better way will be much longer rather than shorter. Your code is trying to 
pick up a complete C++ block by counting the opening and closing braces, 
but this will break as soon as you have a brace character inside a string 
or a comment.

The better solution would be to use a full blown parser, or at least a 
lexer which recognises comments and strings. There are several parsing 
packages for Python, you might like to look at Ply 
(http://www.dabeaz.com/ply/) since that comes with a sample lexer for Ansi 
C, and if you added some extra keywords (such as namespace) you could then 
just treat your input as a token stream.