need help of regular expression genius

[Paul McGuire]

"GHUM" <haraldarminmassa at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1154590996.372956.113320 at s13g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Paul,
>
> > text = """ ... input source text ... ""
> > from pyparsing import SkipTo,Literal,replaceWith
> > ign1 = "$$" + SkipTo("$$") + "$$"
> > ign2 = "$_$" + SkipTo("$_$") + "$_$"
> > semi = Literal(";").setParseAction( replaceWith("; <***>") )
> > print (ign1 | ign2 | semi).transformString(text)
>
> Thank you very much! this really looks beautifull and short! How could
> I forget about pyparsing? Old loves are often better then adventures
> with RE. :)

Good to hear from you again, Harald!  I didn't recognize your "From"
address, but when I looked into the details, I recognized your name from
when we talked about some very early incarnations of pyparsing.

>
> Two questions remain:
> 1) I did not succeed in finding a documentation for pyparsing. Is there
> something like a "full list of Classes and their methods" ?
>

Pyparsing ships with JPG and PNG files containing class diagrams, plus an
htmldoc directory containing epydoc-generated help files.
There are also about 20 example programs included (also accessible in the
wiki).

> 2) as of missing 1) :)): something like
> "setParseAction(splithereandreturnalistofelementssplittedhere) ?
>

I briefly considered what this grammar might look like, and rejected it as
much too complicated compared to .split("<***>").  You could also look into
using scanString instead of transformString (scanString reports the location
within the string of the matched text).  Then when matching on a ";", use
the match location to help slice up the string and append to a list.  But
again, this is so much more complicated than just .split("<***>"), I
wouldn't bother other than as an exercise in learning scanString.

Good luck!
-- Paul