Introduction

Text-processing applications form a substantial part of the application space for any scripting language, if only because everyone can agree that text processing is useful. Everyone has bits of text that need to be reformatted or transformed in various ways. The catch, of course, is that every application is just a little bit different from every other application, so it can be difficult to find just the right reusable code to work with different file formats, no matter how similar they are.

What Is Text?

Sounds like an easy question, doesn't it? After all, we know it when we see it, don't we? Text is a sequence of characters, and it is distinguished from binary data by that very fact. Binary data, after all, is a sequence of bytes.

Unfortunately, all data enters our applications as a sequence of bytes. There's no library function we can call that will tell us whether a particular sequence of bytes represents text, although we can create some useful heuristics that tell us whether data can safely (not necessarily correctly) be handled as text. Recipe 1.11 shows just such a heuristic.

Python strings are immutable sequences of bytes or characters. Most of the ways we create and process strings treat them as sequences of characters, but many are just as applicable to sequences of bytes. Unicode strings are immutable sequences of Unicode characters: transformations of Unicode strings into and from plain strings use codecs (coder-decoders) objects that embody knowledge about the many standard ways in which sequences of characters can be represented by sequences of bytes (also known as encodings and character sets). Note that Unicode strings do not serve double duty as sequences of bytes. Recipe 1.20, Recipe 1.21, and Recipe 1.22 illustrate the fundamentals of Unicode in Python.

Okay, let's assume that our application knows from the context that it's looking at text. That's usually the best approach because that's where external input comes into play. We're looking at a file either because it has a well-known name and defined format (common in the "Unix" world) or because it has a well-known filename extension that indicates the format of the contents (common on Windows). But now we have a problem: we had to use the word format to make the previous paragraph meaningful. Wasn't text supposed to be simple?

Let's face it: there's no such thing as "pure" text, and if there were, we probably wouldn't care about it (with the possible exception of applications in the field of computational linguistics, where pure text may indeed sometimes be studied for its own sake). What we want to deal with in our applications is information contained in text. The text we care about may contain configuration data, commands to control or define processes, documents for human consumption, or even tabular data. Text that contains configuration data or a series of commands usually can be expected to conform to a fairly strict syntax that can be checked before relying on the information in the text. Informing the user of an error in the input text is typically sufficient to deal with things that aren't what we were expecting.

Documents intended for humans tend to be simple, but they vary widely in detail. Since they are usually written in a natural language, their syntax and grammar can be difficult to check, at best. Different texts may use different character sets or encodings, and it can be difficult or even impossible to tell which character set or encoding was used to create a text if that information is not available in addition to the text itself. It is, however, necessary to support proper representation of natural-language documents. Natural-language text has structure as well, but the structures are often less explicit in the text and require at least some understanding of the language in which the text was written. Characters make up words, which make up sentences, which make up paragraphs, and still larger structures may be present as well. Paragraphs alone can be particularly difficult to locate unless you know what typographical conventions were used for a document: is each line a paragraph, or can multiple lines make up a paragraph? If the latter, how do we tell which lines are grouped together to make a paragraph? Paragraphs may be separated by blank lines, indentation, or some other special mark. See Recipe 19.10 for an example of reading a text file as a sequence of paragraphs separated by blank lines.

Tabular data has many issues that are similar to the problems associated with natural-language text, but it adds a second dimension to the input format: the text is no longer linearit is no longer a sequence of characters, but rather a matrix of characters from which individual blocks of text must be identified and organized.

Basic Textual Operations

As with any other data format, we need to do different things with text at different times. However, there