[Tutor] Parsing suggestion? (CUE file)

[Terry Carroll]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Kent Johnson wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Terry Carroll <carroll at tjc.com> wrote:
> 
> > The silver cloud to my temporary Internet outage was that I was able to
> > solve my problem, in the process discovering that the csv module can parse
> > a CUE file[1] quite nicely if you set up an appropriate csv.Dialect class.
> >
> > [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cue_file
> 
> What is the dialect? That sounds like a useful trick.

This seems to be working for me, at least with the sample CUE files I've 
tested with so far:

###############################################################
import csv

class cue(csv.Dialect):
    """Describe the usual properties of CUE files."""
    delimiter = ' '
    quotechar = '"'
    doublequote = True
    skipinitialspace = True
    lineterminator = '\r\n'
    quoting = csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL
csv.register_dialect("cue", cue)

f = open("test.cue", "r")
reader = csv.reader(f,dialect="cue")
for row in reader:
    print row
###############################################################

The dialect is the same as the standard excel dialect, which I cribbed out
of csv.py, except for delimiter and skipinitialspace.

My project is to write a program to convert a CUE file into a list of 
labels that can be imported into Audacity; and perhaps a file of ID3 info 
that can be imported into MP3 tagging software.  If I had to parse the 
blank-separated fields of quoted text that included blanks, I don't know 
how long this would have taken me.