Pyparsing finds first occurence in file

Question

I'm parsing file via

output=wilcard.parseFile(myfile)
print output

And I do get only first match of string.

I have a big config file to parse, with "entries" which are surrounded by braces. I expect to see all the matches that are in file or exception for not matching.

How do I achieve that?

Answer 1

By default, pyparsing will find the longest match, starting at the first character. So, if your parse is given by num = Word('0123456789'), parsing either "462" or "462-780" will both return the same value. However, if the parseAll=True option is passed, the parse will attempt to parse the entire string. In this case, "462" would be matched, but parsing "462-780" would raise a ParseException, because the parser doens't know how to deal with the dash.

I would recommend constructing something that will match the entirety of the file, then using the parseAll=True flag in parseFile(). If I understand your description of each entry being separated by braces correctly, one could do the following.

entire_file = OneOrMore('[' + wildcard + ']')
output = wildcard.parseFile(myfile,parseAll=True)
print output