suggestions for VIN parsing

[Vincent Davis]

Tim and Ben,
Thanks for your input, I am working on it now and will come back when I
have questions.
Any comment on using pyparsing VS regex

Vincent Davis
720-301-3003

On Thu, Dec 25, 2014 at 7:18 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au>
wrote:

> Vincent Davis <vincent at vincentdavis.net> writes:
>
> > I don't want to parse the page, I what a function that given a VIN
> > (frame or engine number) returns the year the bike was made.
>
> So the page has a collection of tables which the reader can use to
> manually look up the VIN, or elements of the VIN, to determine the range
> of dates of manufacture.
>
> Your problem is to come up with a suitable data structure to map VIN to
> date range.
>
> The core of this, in Python, is going to be a ‘dict’ instance. You need
> to represent “part of a VIN” as the key, and “range of dates” as the
> resulting value.
>
>
> For the value, a “date range” is expressed simply by a 2-item tuple of
> dates::
>
>     import datetime
>     date_range = (datetime.date(1979, 8, 1), datetime.date(1980, 7, 31))
>
> If you want something a little more expressive, make a namedtuple to
> name the items in the tuple::
>
>     import datetime
>     import collections
>
>     DateRange = collections.namedtuple('DateRange', ['begin', 'end'])
>
>     date_range = DateRange(
>             begin=datetime.date(1979, 8, 1),
>             end=datetime.date(1980, 7, 31))
>
>
> Given that a VIN is (despite the number) not a number, but instead a
> string of characters, I would recommend using “string prefix” as the
> key.
>
> To match a VIN, iterate through the keys and attempt a match against the
> prefix; if a match is found, the date range is obtained simply by
> getting the corresponding value from the dictionary.
>
> However, you have some entries in those tables with “prefix ranges”. You
> can extrapolate from what I wrote here to come up with a method for
> matching within a range of prefixes.
>
>
> I *strongly* recommend keeping the data set small until you come up with
> a working means to store and look up the information. While you do so,
> feel free to post (small!) code examples here to show your working.
>
> Good hunting.
>
> --
>  \     “The Vatican is not a state.… a state must have territory. This |
>   `\         is a palace with gardens, about as big as an average golf |
> _o__)                         course.” —Geoffrey Robertson, 2010-09-18 |
> Ben Finney
>
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