Track 7 · Lesson 7 of 11

Parsing structured text

Turn settings files, log lines and simple comma-separated data into Python dictionaries and lists, line by line, and see where hand-written parsing stops working.

You will be able to

• Process multi-line text line by line with splitlines(), skipping blank and comment lines
• Parse key=value settings into a dictionary, including values that contain the separator
• Break log lines into named fields with split(maxsplit=...) and checks on each part
• Convert simple comma-separated text with a header row into a list of dictionaries
• Explain why quoted fields need the csv module instead of split(",")