How to parse code (in Python)?

I need to parse some special data structures. They are in some somewhat-like-C format that looks roughly like this:

Group("GroupName") {
    /* C-Style comment */
    Group("AnotherGroupName") {
        Entry("some","variables",0,3.141);
        Entry("other","variables",1,2.718);
    }
    Entry("linebreaks",
          "allowed",
          3,
          1.414
         );
}

I can think of several ways to go about this. I could 't开发者_如何学JAVAokenize' the code using regular expressions. I could read the code one character at a time and use a state machine to construct my data structure. I could get rid of comma-linebreaks and read the thing line by line. I could write some conversion script that converts this code to executable Python code.

Is there a nice pythonic way to parse files like this?

How would you go about parsing it?

This is more a general question about how to parse strings and not so much about this particular file format.

Using pyparsing (Mark Tolonen, I was just about to click "Submit Post" when your post came thru), this is pretty straightforward - see comments embedded in the code below:

data = """Group("GroupName") { 
    /* C-Style comment */ 
    Group("AnotherGroupName") { 
        Entry("some","variables",0,3.141); 
        Entry("other","variables",1,2.718); 
    } 
    Entry("linebreaks", 
          "allowed", 
          3, 
          1.414 
         ); 
} """

from pyparsing import *

# define basic punctuation and data types
LBRACE,RBRACE,LPAREN,RPAREN,SEMI = map(Suppress,"{}();")
GROUP = Keyword("Group")
ENTRY = Keyword("Entry")

# use parse actions to do parse-time conversion of values
real = Regex(r"[+-]?\d+\.\d*").setParseAction(lambda t:float(t[0]))
integer = Regex(r"[+-]?\d+").setParseAction(lambda t:int(t[0]))

# parses a string enclosed in quotes, but strips off the quotes at parse time
string = QuotedString('"')

# define structure expressions
value = string | real | integer
entry = Group(ENTRY + LPAREN + Group(Optional(delimitedList(value)))) + RPAREN + SEMI

# since Groups can contain Groups, need to use a Forward to define recursive expression
group = Forward()
group << Group(GROUP + LPAREN + string("name") + RPAREN + 
            LBRACE + Group(ZeroOrMore(group | entry))("body") + RBRACE)

# ignore C style comments wherever they occur
group.ignore(cStyleComment)

# parse the sample text
result = group.parseString(data)

# print out the tokens as a nice indented list using pprint
from pprint import pprint
pprint(result.asList())

Prints

[['Group',
  'GroupName',
  [['Group',
    'AnotherGroupName',
    [['Entry', ['some', 'variables', 0, 3.141]],
     ['Entry', ['other', 'variables', 1, 2.718]]]],
   ['Entry', ['linebreaks', 'allowed', 3, 1.4139999999999999]]]]]

(Unfortunately, there may be some confusion since pyparsing defines a "Group" class, for imparting structure to the parsed tokens - note how the value lists in an Entry get grouped because the list expression is enclosed within a pyparsing Group.)

Check out pyparsing. It has lots of parsing examples.

Depends on how often you need this and if the syntax stays the same. If the answers are "quite often" and "more or less yes" then I would look at a way to express the syntax and write a specific parser to that language with a tool like PyPEG or LEPL. Defining the parser rules is the big job so unless you need to parse the same kind of files often it might not necessarily be effective, though.

But if you look at the PyPEG page it tells you how to output the parsed data to XML so if that tool doesn't give enough power to you, you could use it to generate the XML and then use e.g. lxml to parse the xml.