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scanf in python...?

Steve Clift sgclift at earthlink.net
Wed Oct 18 01:37:38 EDT 2000 
"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> "Tony Waterman" <tonyw54 at home.com> wrote in message
>> Does python have any way to mimic scanf ? I just bought Python on
>> Win32 and I can't find anything in there about it, or on the
>> python.org html tutorial. Also; how many ways to mimic scanf are
>> there?
>
> xscanf(x, format,  pointer1, pointer2, .... pointern) is not directly
> possible in Python because Python does not have pointers.
>
> However, it would be possible to write a scan(string,format) function that
> would return a tuple of values.  Since Python uses C formats for the %
> operator, it would add a nice symmetry.  [IE, scan(format%tuple,format) ==
> tuple].

That's approximately what the sscanf module I wrote about 5 years ago does
(I got fed up with all the hooplah involved in reading tables of mixed data
types using the standard Python facilities). You can find it by doing a web
search on sscanfmodule.c. I have no way of compiling it to be useful under
Windows, unfortunately.

Steve
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