Need to extract data from a text file or aweb page? Or do you want to make yourapplication more flexible with user-definedcommands or search strings? Doregular expressions and lex/yacc makeyour eyes blur and your brain hurt?
Pyparsing could be the solution. Pyparsingis a pure-Python class library thatmakes it easy to build recursive-descentparsers quickly. There is no need tohandcraft your own parsing state machine.With pyparsing, you can quicklycreate HTML page scrapers, logfile dataextractors, or complex data structure orcommand processors. This Short Cutshows you how!
Paul McGuire earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a master's in manufacturing systems engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. During his career, he has worked primarily in manufacturing systems applications for such companies as General Electric, Fairchild Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, Sematech, and KLA-Tencor.
After dabbling in Python, Paul decided to pursue his interest in text processing, and developed the pyparsing class library. This project has taken on a life of its own and has been downloaded more than 11,000 times. Paul has enjoyed hearing from pyparsing users in the United States, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Russia, the Czech Republic, France, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, Italy, India, the Netherlands, Finland, Poland, Denmark, Australia, Slovenia, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
Paul is currently a principal with Alan Weber & Associates, an independent consulting organization specializing in software applications for semiconductor manufacturing and process control.
Comments about oreilly Getting Started with Pyparsing:
OK, so there is one developer who invented pyparsing. He is brilliant. He did everything. He wrote a short book. But the whole thing is still undocumented. This guide will not help you do anything that is not done in this book. The help in the python code will not help you.
Until someone other than the coder writes a description of some software, you can be sure the documentation follows the pattern"
Gobbeldeegook: Applies Gobbels to deegook. Sometimes you have to dee before gook, but that is obvious. Returns Gobbels.
Gobbels: what comes out of Gobbledeegook.
deegook: everyone knows what a deegook is. By the way, you might want to try using class SomeUnDocumentedFeatureClassThatIsNotDiscussedAnywhere.
Save yourself much time, forget this whole pyparsing thing. Spend a month learning re. It will be quicker than learning enough to solve a 2-hour string parsing problem. The developer is swamped refining code and solving everyone's problems in forums and message lists.
