August 2006
Intermediate to advanced
1600 pages
51h 46m
English
In the grand scheme of things, there are a variety of ways to handle text processing in Python:
Built-in string object expressions
String object method calls
Regular expression matching
Parser-generator integrations
Handcoded and generated parsers
Running Python code with eval and exec 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 with both string method calls and built-in functions. 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 with representative examples.