Strategies for Parsing Text in Python
In the grand scheme of things, there are a variety of ways to handle text processing in Python:
Built-in string objects
String module (and method) utilities
Regular expression matching
Parser-generator integrations
Hand-coded parsers
Running Python code with
eval
andexec
built-ins
For simpler tasks, Python’s built-in string object is often all
we really need. Python strings can be indexed, concatenated, sliced,
and processed both with built-in functions and with the
string
module. Our emphasis in this chapter,
though, is on higher-level tools and techniques for analyzing textual
information. Let’s briefly explore each of the other approaches
above with representative examples.
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