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There are plenty of Python parsing tools: http://nedbatchelder.com/text/python-parsers.html
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Yes, there are many -- too many -- parsing tools, but none in the standard library.
From what what I saw PLY and SPARK are popular. PLY is like yacc, but you do everything in Python because you write your grammar in docstrings.
Personally, I like the concept of parser combinators (taken from functional programming), and I quite like pyparsing: you write your grammar and actions directly in python and it is easy to start with. I ended up producing my own tree node types with actions though, instead of using their default ParserElement type.
Otherwise, you can also use existing declarative language like YAML.
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I've always been impressed by pyparsing. The author, Paul McGuire, is active on the python list/comp.lang.python and has always been very helpful with any queries concerning it.
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Here's an approach that works really well.
abc= ONETHING( ... )
xyz= ANOTHERTHING( ... )
pqr= SOMETHING( this=abc, that=123, more=(xyz,123) )
Declarative. Easy-to-parse.
And...
It's actually Python. A few class declarations and the work is done. The DSL is actually class declarations.
What's important is that a DSL merely creates objects. When you define a DSL, first you have to start with an object model. Later, you put some syntax around that object model. You don't start with syntax, you start with the model.
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I have written something like this in work to read in SNMP notification definitions and automatically generate Java classes and SNMP MIB files from this. Using this little DSL, I could write 20 lines of my specification and it would generate roughly 80 lines of Java code and a 100 line MIB file.
To implement this, I actually just used straight Python string handling (split(), slicing etc) to parse the file. I find Pythons string capabilities to be adequate for most of my (simple) parsing needs.
Besides the libraries mentioned by others, if I were writing something more complex and needed proper parsing capabilities, I would probably use ANTLR, which supports Python (and other languages).
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Peter,
DSLs are a good thing, so you don't need to defend yourself :-)
However, have you considered an internal DSL ? These have so many pros versus external (parsed) DSLs that they're at least worth consideration. Mixing a DSL with the power of the native language really solves lots of the problems for you, and Python is not really bad at internal DSLs, with the with statement handy.
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For "small languages" as the one you are describing, I use a simple split, shlex (mind that the # defines a comment) or regular expressions.
>>> line = 'SOMETHING: !abc @123 #xyz/123'
>>> line.split()
['SOMETHING:', '!abc', '@123', '#xyz/123']
>>> import shlex
>>> list(shlex.shlex(line))
['SOMETHING', ':', '!', 'abc', '@', '123']
The following is an example, as I do not know exactly what you are looking for.
>>> import re
>>> result = re.match(r'([A-Z]*): !([a-z]*) @([0-9]*) #([a-z0-9/]*)', line)
>>> result.groups()
('SOMETHING', 'abc', '123', 'xyz/123')