Picking apart strings

[Russ P.]

On Jun 3, 11:44 am, tmallen <thomasmal... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a way to pick apart this text without resorting to regular
> expressions?
>
> p {
>     color: black;
>
> }
>
> p -> element
> color -> property
> black -> value

Sure.

data = txt.strip("}").split("{")

element = data[0].strip()

items = data[1].split(";")

for item in items:

    data = item.split(":")
    property = data[0].strip() # avoid this keyword
    value = data[1].strip()

I didn't test this. Also, the module suggested in the other reply
might make more sense, depending on how much of this sort of thing you
need to do.