simplified Python parsing question

[Eric S. Johansson]

On 7/29/2012 11:33 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:21:49 -0400, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>
>> When you are sitting on or in a name, you look to the left or look to
>> the right what would you see that would tell you that you have gone past
>> the end of that name. For example
> Have you read the docs? It gives full details of the Python syntax.

Yes I have. I was hoping for a different perspective because what I'm trying to 
do is middle out parsing. Top-down when the scanner focus moves from left to 
right and bottom up when the scanner focus moves from right to left.

sounds kind of odd when I describe it that way but both the cursor is on the 
middle of a name string and I need to look to either end of that name string 
before can do a conversion to a symbol string, I have to look at both ends in 
different ways. If you've read the documentation I've provided, would it be a 
better example to use for describing some of the issues. Here's a very rough 
draft of a storyboard

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fuKyo9AE6i9ZdX2lucwK0v_W5Kx9M3Mezavm40wzCo8/edit

the first 13-14 slides are the working content for the storyboard. the rest is 
mostly "memory" of things I was thinking about so if it doesn't make sense or 
seems wrong, don't give me grief. :-)

> Here's a Python parser using the pyparsing library. It's a bit old
> (written for Python 2.4) but it shouldn't be hard to update it to new
> syntax:
>
> http://pyparsing.wikispaces.com/file/view/pythonGrammarParser.py
>

thanks for the reference. I'll take a look at it as well.