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Can you elaborate a bit on this please? I'd be interested in resources on writing better parsers!

Quickly looking at the python standard lib (urlparse, shlex, etc) and Python packages (NLTK Treebank tokenizer), a lot of packages related to slicing, dicing and parsing strings use a mashup of regex and rule based code.

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No experience with them in python, but look also for PEG grammars. They are significantly simpler than the traditional tower of lexer + ambiguous limited lookahead grammar.

Plus the memoized Packrat algorithm allows throwing in functions with custom conditions. (Somewhat like parser combinators, they also support custom logic.)

Parser combinators are the way to go. I don't use python often enough to know if such a library exists for python, but I would assume so.

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