Roy Smith already touched on regular expressions, but as far as features go, I would say that the real difference between python and perl is not in the features, but in the philosophy. It seems to me that any program you can write in python could also be written in perl. What it comes down to for me was which language most fit the way I tend to think. I decided python was that language, and I found everything very intuitive. I have a good friend who thinks in perl and is very productive using it.
Other people might disagree, but when I was looking at perl and python I borrowed recent copies of "Learning Perl" and "Learning Python" from the O'Reilly series and after reading each, decided I preferred python. You can find out about most of the features in those books. Chris -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
