best way to parse a function-call-like string?

[John Machin]

On Feb 27, 8:29 am, m... at pixar.com wrote:
> I have some strings that look like function calls, e.g.
>
>         "junkpkg.f1"
>         "junkpkg.f1()"
>         "junkpkg.f1('aaa')"
>         "junkpkg.f1('aaa','bbb')"
>         "junkpkg.f1('aaa','bbb','ccc')"
>         "junkpkg.f1('aaa','with,comma')"

Examples are better than no examples, but a grammar would be a great
help. What about
   "junkpkg.f1('aaa','with)parenthesis')"
   "junkpkg.f1('aaa','with''ONEapostrophe')"

>
> and I need to split them into the function name and list of parms, e.g.
>
>         "junkpkg.f1", []
>         "junkpkg.f1", []
>         "junkpkg.f1", ['aaa']
>         "junkpkg.f1", ['aaa','bbb']
>         "junkpkg.f1", ['aaa','bbb','ccc']
>         "junkpkg.f1", ['aaa','with,comma']
>
> What's the best way to do this?  I would be interested in either
> of two approaches:
>
>    - a "real" way which comprehensively
>
>    - a quick-and-dirty way which handles most cases, so that I
>      can get my coding partner running quickly while I do the
>      "real" way.  will the csv module do the right thing for
>      the parm list?

It should, for "most cases". Any reason you can't try it out for
yourself?

It appears to "work" in the sense that if you have isolated a string
containing the parameters, the csv module can be used to "parse" it:

| Python 2.6.1 (r261:67517, Dec  4 2008, 16:51:00) [MSC v.1500 32 bit
(Intel)] on win32
| Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
| >>> import csv, cStringIO
| >>> argstring = "'aaa','with,comma'"
| >>> csvargs = lambda s: list(csv.reader(cStringIO.StringIO(s),
quotechar="'"))
| >>> csvargs(argstring)
| [['aaa', 'with,comma']]
| >>> csvargs("'aaa','with''ONEapostrophe'")
| [['aaa', "with'ONEapostrophe"]]
| >>>

HTH
John