Well, this doesn't have the terseness of an re solution, but it shouldn't be hard to follow. -- Paul
#~ This is a very crude first pass. It does not handle nested #~ ()'s, nor ()'s inside quotes. But if your data does not #~ stray too far from the example, this will probably do the job. #~ Download pyparsing at http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net. import pyparsing as pp test = "AAA, BBB , CCC (some text, right here), DDD" COMMA = pp.Literal(",") LPAREN = pp.Literal("(") RPAREN = pp.Literal(")") parenthesizedText = LPAREN + pp.SkipTo(RPAREN) + RPAREN nonCommaChars = "".join( [ chr(c) for c in range(32,127) if c not in map(ord,list(",()")) ] ) nonCommaText = pp.Word(nonCommaChars) commaListEntry = pp.Combine(pp.OneOrMore( parenthesizedText | nonCommaText ),adjacent=False) commaListEntry.setParseAction( lambda s,l,t: t[0].strip() ) csvList = pp.delimitedList( commaListEntry ) print csvList.parseString(test) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
