Paul McGuire wrote: > Me? Push? Boy, a guy posts a couple of examples, tries to help some > people that are stuck with a problem, and what does he get? Called > "pushy"? Sheesh!
Hey, I never called you pushy! Ok, maybe I sounded a little harsh--I was pretty frustrated after all. I guess I should have said something along the lines of, "If you are going to promote pyparsing, it would be nice to be able see what it is all about it." > Fortunately, I get enough positive feedback from > these posts that my feelings are pretty resilient these days. > > Anyway, thanks and point taken for the alert on this subject from the > newbie's perspective. When I first wrote these installations and > started the pyparsing project on SF, I was fairly newb myself - I had > to ask Dave Kuhlman to write setup.py for me! So I assumed the target > audience already knew the stuff I was having to learn. I assumed that > setup.py was just common knowledge among the Python world. > > I think your suggestion of a Wiki page on this subject should fill > this gap neatly, especially since pyparsing is somewhat targetted at > the newb and near-newb user, one that is struggling with regexp's or > some other parsing technology, and just wants to get some basic code > working. The other posts in this thread contain plenty of material to > start from. Also, thanks for the Mac OS X point of view, most of my > work is on Windows, and a little bit on Linux, but absolutely none on > Mac. And I see that I should not assume knowledge of tar, either, so > I'll be sure to mention its destructive streak, in overwriting > existing files with the same name as those in the archive. Once > untar'ed, there *is* a file named README, with an introduction and > instructions to invoke setup.py properly. Iol. I read it: --------------------- Installation ============ Do the usual: python setup.py install (pyparsing requires Python 2.3.2 or later.) ------------------------ Not much to go on--not even a mention of what directory you should be in when you run that command. Plus, you need to extract the files from the .tar file first. > > I'm glad to see you perservered and got pyparsing installed. You can > also run pyparsing.py itself, which will run a simple SQL parser > test. If you have not yet found the docs or examples, *please* look > over the sample code in the examples directory, and the class-level > documentation in the htmldocs directory. The docs directory should > also include the materials from my PyCon'06 presentations. > > Please post back, either here or on the Pyparsing wiki discussion > pages, and let me know how your pyparsing work is progressing. > > -- Paul (the developer, but you can call me "Paul") > I'm pretty facile with regex's, and after looking at some pyparsing threads over the last week or so, I was interested in trying it. However, all of the beginning examples use a Word() in the parse expression, but I couldn't find an adequate explanation of what the arguments to Word() are and what they mean. I finally found the information buried in one of the many documents--the one called "Using the Pyparsing Module". If that seems like an obvious place to look, I did start there, but I didn't find it at first. I also scoured the the wiki, and I looked in the file pycon06- IntroToPyparsing-notes.pdf, which has this: Basic Pyparsing Words and Literals -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list