Another pyparsing release, this time with many enhancements to parse
actions. The major items are:
- simplified parse action interface; parse actions no longer must
take all three arguments consisting of the original parsed string,
the parsed location, and the parsed tokens; parse actions can now
be defined with simplified argument interfaces:
. no arguments
. just the parsed tokens
. just the parse location and parsed tokens
- REMOVED SUPPORT FOR PARSE ACTIONS THAT RETURN LOCATION AND TOKENS;
or looking at this another way, added support for parse actions to
return tuples; parse actions that previously returned loc,tokens
will now be interpreted to return the tuple (loc, tokens); this
impending change was announced over 2 years ago, with explicit
deprecation warnings in the previous release
- new troubleshooting helper decorator, traceParseAction
- new parse action helper class OnlyOnce, for parse actions that
should only be called one time; subsequent invocations of an
OnlyOnce-wrapped parse action will raise a ParseException
- new setFailAction, to attach a method to an expression to be called
when the expression is tried and fails (sort of an anti-parse
action)
- fixed the attachment of multiple parse actions, by breaking out the
attempt at mind-reading in setParseAction; setParseAction now
reverts to its previous behavior, and addParseAction appends
new functions to the expression's list of parse actions
- some new examples:
. list string parser (reconstitutes a Python list from a string
representation), including lists that contain elements that are
lists, tuples, ints, reals, or quoted strings
. line number demonstration, using the pyparsing line, lineno and
col built-ins
. listAllMatches example
. line break remover, for removing hard line breaks in word-wrapped
paragraphs with blank lines between paragraphs

Download the latest version of pyparsing at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=97203.

-- Paul

========================================
Pyparsing is a pure-Python class library for quickly developing
recursive-descent parsers. Parser grammars are assembled directly in
the calling Python code, using classes such as Literal, Word,
OneOrMore, Optional, etc., combined with operators '+', '|', and '^'
for And, MatchFirst, and Or. No separate code-generation or external
files are required. Pyparsing can be used in many cases in place of
regular expressions, with shorter learning curve and greater
readability and maintainability. Pyparsing comes with a number of
parsing examples, including:
- "Hello, World!" (English and Korean)
- chemical formulas
- configuration file parser
- web page URL extractor
- 5-function arithmetic expression parser
- subset of CORBA IDL
- chess portable game notation
- simple SQL parser
- Mozilla calendar file parser
- EBNF parser/compiler

========================================
Here is the full change note for this release:

Version 1.4.3 - July, 2006
------------------------------
- Fixed implementation of multiple parse actions for an expression
(added in 1.4.2).
. setParseAction() reverts to its previous behavior, setting
one (or more) actions for an expression, overwriting any
action or actions previously defined
. new method addParseAction() appends one or more parse actions
to the list of parse actions attached to an expression
Now it is harder to accidentally append parse actions to an
expression, when what you wanted to do was overwrite whatever had
been defined before. (Thanks, Jean-Paul Calderone!)

- Simplified interface to parse actions that do not require all 3
parse action arguments. Very rarely do parse actions require more
than just the parsed tokens, yet parse actions still require all
3 arguments including the string being parsed and the location
within the string where the parse expression was matched. With this
release, parse actions may now be defined to be called as:
. fn(string,locn,tokens) (the current form)
. fn(locn,tokens)
. fn(tokens)
. fn()
The setParseAction and addParseAction methods will internally decorate
the provided parse actions with compatible wrappers to conform to
the full (string,locn,tokens) argument sequence.

- REMOVED SUPPORT FOR RETURNING PARSE LOCATION FROM A PARSE ACTION.
I announced this in March, 2004, and gave a final warning in the last
release. Now you can return a tuple from a parse action, and it will
be treated like any other return value (i.e., the tuple will be
substituted for the incoming tokens passed to the parse action,
which is useful when trying to parse strings into tuples).

- Added setFailAction method, taking a callable function fn that
takes the arguments fn(s,loc,expr,err) where:
. s - string being parsed
. loc - location where expression match was attempted and failed
. expr - the parse expression that failed
. err - the exception thrown
The function returns no values. It may throw ParseFatalException
if it is desired to stop parsing immediately.
(Suggested by peter21081944 on wikispaces.com)

- Added class OnlyOnce as helper wrapper for parse actions. OnlyOnce
only permits a parse action to be called one time, after which
all subsequent calls throw a ParseException.

- Added traceParseAction decorator to help debug parse actions.
Simply insert "@traceParseAction" ahead of the definition of your
parse action, and each invocation will be displayed, along with
incoming arguments, and returned value.

- Fixed bug when copying ParserElements using copy() or
setResultsName(). (Reported by Dan Thill, great catch!)

- Fixed bug in asXML() where token text contains <, >, and &
characters - generated XML now escapes these as &lt;, &gt; and
&amp;. (Reported by Jacek Sieka, thanks!)

- Fixed bug in SkipTo() when searching for a StringEnd(). (Reported
by Pete McEvoy, thanks Pete!)

- Fixed "except Exception" statements, the most critical added as part
of the packrat parsing enhancement. (Thanks, Erick Tryzelaar!)

- Fixed end-of-string infinite looping on LineEnd and StringEnd
expressions. (Thanks again to Erick Tryzelaar.)

- Modified setWhitespaceChars to return self, to be consistent with
other ParserElement modifiers. (Suggested by Erick Tryzelaar.)

- Fixed bug/typo in new ParseResults.dump() method.

- Fixed bug in searchString() method, in which only the first token of
an expression was returned. searchString() now returns a
ParseResults collection of all search matches.

- Added example program removeLineBreaks.py, a string transformer that
converts text files with hard line-breaks into one with line breaks
only between paragraphs.

- Added example program listAllMatches.py, to illustrate using the
listAllMatches option when specifying results names (also shows new
support for passing lists to oneOf).

- Added example program linenoExample.py, to illustrate using the
helper methods lineno, line, and col, and returning objects from a
parse action.

- Added example program parseListString.py, to which can parse the
string representation of a Python list back into a true list. Taken
mostly from my PyCon presentation examples, but now with support
for tuple elements, too!