Question

I’m looking for an equivalent to sscanf() in Python. I want to parse /proc/net/* files, in C I could do something like this:

int matches = sscanf(
        buffer,
        "%*d: %64[0-9A-Fa-f]:%X %64[0-9A-Fa-f]:%X %*X %*X:%*X %*X:%*X %*X %*d %*d %ld %*512s\n",
        local_addr, &local_port, rem_addr, &rem_port, &inode);

I thought at first to use str.split, however it doesn’t split on the given characters, but the sep string as a whole:

>>> lines = open("/proc/net/dev").readlines()
>>> for l in lines[2:]:
>>>     cols = l.split(string.whitespace + ":")
>>>     print len(cols)
1

Which should be returning 17, as explained above.

Is there a Python equivalent to sscanf (not RE), or a string splitting function in the standard library that splits on any of a range of characters that I’m not aware of?

Answer 1

Python doesn’t have an sscanf equivalent built-in, and most of the time it actually makes a whole lot more sense to parse the input by working with the string directly, using regexps, or using a parsing tool.

Probably mostly useful for translating C, people have implemented sscanf, such as in this module: http://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/scanf/

In this particular case if you just want to split the data based on multiple split characters, re.split is really the right tool.