Motivation
----------
The ``stringparser`` module provides a simple way to match patterns and extract
information within strings. As patterns are given using the familiar format
string specification :pep:`3101`, writing them is much easier than writing
regular expressions (albeit less powerful).
Examples
--------
You can build a reusable parser object::
>>> parser = Parser('The answer is {:d}')
>>> parser('The answer is 42')
42
>>> parser('The answer is 54')
54
Or directly::
>>> Parser('The answer is {:d}')('The answer is 42')
42
You can retrieve many fields::
>>> Parser('The {:s} is {:d}')('The answer is 42')
('answer', 42)
And you can use numbered fields to order the returned tuple::
>>> Parser('The {1:s} is {0:d}')('The answer is 42')
(42, 'answer')
Or named fields to return an OrderedDict::
>>> Parser('The {a:s} is {b:d}')('The answer is 42')
OrderedDict([('a', 'answer'), ('b', 42)])
You can ignore some fields using _ as a name::
>>> Parser('The {_:s} is {:d}')('The answer is 42')
42
Limitations
-----------
- From the format string:
`[[fill]align][sign][#][0][minimumwidth][.precision][type]`
only `type`, `sign` and `#` are currently implemented.
This might cause trouble to match certain notation like:
- decimal: '-4' written as '- 4'
- etc
- Lines are matched from beginning to end. {:d} will NOT return all
the numbers in the string. Use regex for that.