Config parser module

[qqcq6s59 at gmail.com]

Hi all
I am a newbie and I just saw a ongoing thread on Fileprocessing which
talks abt config parser.
I have writen many pyhton program to parse many kind of text files by
using string module and regex. But after reading that config parser
thread I feel stunned.

Can somebody tell me some intro info how to parse huge data (most of
them are input data to application softwares like nastran, abaqus etc)

Recently I saw a great work by John on Nastran file parser (i am still
trying to understand the program,
http://jrfonseca.dyndns.org/svn/phd/python/Data/Nastran/

An example of dat may be like this, (part of)
(say point  id     coordinateSysNo x,y,z ...)
GRID           1       12478.0  0.0     256.75         1
GRID           2       12357.25 0.0     256.75         1
GRID           3       12357.25 0.0     199.0          1
(say Elementtype id  property point1 point 2 point3 point4 etc)
CQUAD4      7231      21    5691    5700    5701    56920.0

CQUAD4      7232      21    5692    5701    5702    56930.0

CQUAD4      7233      21    5693    5702    5703    56940.0

the data file is very complex if i consider all complexities)

Is is possible to use config parser module insome way for this. I also
have few perl parser (for some part for some particular tasks) and now
changing them to python. (I feel perl regex combination is very easy to
learn and very powerfull)

Any information will be appreciated.

-jiro