Scanf --- a pure Python scanf-like module

If you've ever wanted to say:

import scanf
print scanf.sscanf("/usr/sbin/sendmail - 0 errors, 4 warnings",
                   "%s - %d errors, %d warnings")

Releases

All software releases of this package are licensed under the New BSD license.

• scanf-1.2.tar.gz July 23, 2008. Bug fix for error reported by Wentao Han; scanf.scanf wasn't behaving properly.
• scanf-1.1.tar.gz November 23, 2005. Bug fix for error reported by Ralph Heinkel: %f wasn't eating leading whitespace as it should have.
• scanf-1.0.tar.gz August 24, 2004. Requires Python 2.3.

Description

scanf provides formatted input from standard input, strings, or files, using a format-string syntax that's similar to C's scanf(). The syntax should be familiar to C programmers, and offers very simple pattern matching against strings and files.

Functions

• scanf(formatString) formatted scanning across sys.stdin. Returns a tuple of the captured results.
• sscanf(inputString, formatString) formatted scanning across strings. Returns a tuple of the captured results.
• fscanf(inputFile, formatString) formatted scanning across files. Returns a tuple of the captured results.

Supported syntax

% [*] [width] [type]

• [*] suppresses variable capture. Optional.
• [width] defines maximum number of characters. Optional.
• [type] defines the type of the format string. We've implemented the following:

  d	decimal integer.
  i	integer. The integer may be in octal (leading zero) or hexadecimal (leading 0x or 0X).
  o	octal integer (with or without leading zero).
  x	hexadecimal integer (with or without leading 0x or 0X)
  c	characters. The next input characters (default 1) are placed at the indicated spot. The normal skip over white space is suppressed; to read the next non-white space character, use %1s.
  s	character string (not quoted).
  f	floating-point number with optional sign and optional decimal point.
  %	literal %; no assignment is made.

History and related modules

There is a sscanfmodule.c extension module in contrib section of Python.org, although I'm not sure how fresh this is. There was also a fairly large thread about this on comp.lang.python, although it looks like the consensus was to recommend regular expressions.

There was also a discussion on Python-dev about adding another scanf-like operator, to offer symmetry with String Formatting. Although adding a new operator didn't appear to fly, it looks like people agreed that having a scanf module might be a good idea.

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