<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > man, now that is beautifully done. Paul, I wish I knew about pyparsing > a while ago. I could have used it in a few projects. :) > Thanks for the compliment! I'll be the first to admit that pyparsing can be a bit persnickety in some applications, especially when you have to trap on end-of-line, or have some columnar-dependent syntax. pyparsing really works best with data that has some syntactic structure to it, but is not whitespace sensitive (pyparsing's default behavior is to skip over whitespace). I don't recommend it when the data is well-formed - regexp's or even just string.split() will blow it away from a performance (and simplicity) standpoint. For instance, if the OP knew that all his data was itemId, tapeId, recordNum, startTime, endTime, comment, he could have most easily parsed it with
item, tape, recordNum, startTime, endTime, comment = dataline.split(None,5) It's just those optional and variable-formatted fields that getcha. :) -- Paul pyparsing can be downloaded at http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
