sscanf in Python

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.

Answer 2

you can turn the ":" to space, and do the split.eg

>>> f=open("/proc/net/dev")
>>> for line in f:
...     line=line.replace(":"," ").split()
...     print len(line)

no regex needed (for this case)

Answer 3

There is a Python 2 implementation by odiak.

Answer 4

When I'm in a C mood, I usually use zip and list comprehensions for scanf-like behavior. Like this:

input = '1 3.0 false hello'
(a, b, c, d) = [t(s) for t,s in zip((int,float,strtobool,str),input.split())]
print (a, b, c, d)

Note that for more complex format strings, you do need to use regular expressions:

import re
input = '1:3.0 false,hello'
(a, b, c, d) = [t(s) for t,s in zip((int,float,strtobool,str),re.search('^(\d+):([\d.]+) (\w+),(\w+)$',input).groups())]
print (a, b, c, d)

Note also that you need conversion functions for all types you want to convert. For example, above I used something like:

strtobool = lambda s: {'true': True, 'false': False}[s]

Answer 5

Update: The Python documentation for its regex module, re, includes a section on simulating scanf, which I found more useful than any of the answers above.

https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#simulating-scanf