The pyparsing module is an alternative approach to creating and executing simple grammars, vs. the traditional lex/yacc approach, or the use of regular expressions. The pyparsing module provides a library of classes that client code uses to construct the grammar directly in Python code.
Here is a program to parse “Hello, World!” (or any greeting of the form “salutation, addressee!”):
from pyparsing import Word, alphas
greet = Word( alphas ) + "," + Word( alphas ) + "!"
hello = "Hello, World!"
print(hello, "->", greet.parseString( hello ))The program outputs the following:
Hello, World! -> ['Hello', ',', 'World', '!']
The Python representation of the grammar is quite readable, owing to the self-explanatory class names, and the use of ‘+’, ‘|’ and ‘^’ operator definitions.
The parsed results returned from parseString() can be accessed as a nested list, a dictionary, or an object with named attributes.
The pyparsing module handles some of the problems that are typically vexing when writing text parsers: - extra or missing whitespace (the above program will also handle “Hello,World!”, “Hello , World !”, etc.) - quoted strings - embedded comments
The examples directory includes a simple SQL parser, simple CORBA IDL parser, a config file parser, a chemical formula parser, and a four- function algebraic notation parser, among many others.
MIT License. See header of pyparsing.py
See CHANGES file.