Need to extract data from a text file or a web page? Or do you want to make your application more flexible with user-defined commands or search strings? Do regular expressions and lex/yacc make your eyes blur and your brain hurt?

Pyparsing could be the solution. Pyparsing is a pure-Python class library that makes it easy to build recursive-descent parsers quickly. There is no need to handcraft your own parsing state machine. With pyparsing, you can quickly create HTML page scrapers, logfile data extractors, or complex data structure or command processors. This Short Cut shows you how!