Python parsing bracketed blocks

Question

What would be the best way in Python to parse out chunks of text contained in matching brackets?

\"{ { a } { b } { { { c } } } }\"

should i

Answer 1

Here is a solution I came up with for a similar use case. This was loosely based on the accepted psuedo code answer. I didn't want to add any dependencies for external libraries:

def parse_segments(source, recurse=False):
    """
    extract any substring enclosed in parenthesis
    source should be a string
    """
    unmatched_count = 0
    start_pos = 0
    opened = False
    open_pos = 0
    cur_pos = 0

    finished = []
    segments = []

    for character in source:
        #scan for mismatched parenthesis:
        if character == '(':
            unmatched_count += 1
            if not opened:
                open_pos = cur_pos
            opened = True

        if character == ')':
            unmatched_count -= 1

        if opened and unmatched_count == 0:
            segment = source[open_pos:cur_pos+1]
            segments.append(segment)
            clean = source[start_pos:open_pos]
            if clean:
                finished.append(clean)
            opened = False
            start_pos = cur_pos+1

        cur_pos += 1

    assert unmatched_count == 0

    if start_pos != cur_pos:
        #get anything that was left over here
        finished.append(source[start_pos:cur_pos])

    #now check on recursion:
    for item in segments:
        #get rid of bounding parentheses:
        pruned = item[1:-1]
        if recurse:
            results = parse_tags(pruned, recurse)
            finished.expand(results)
        else:
            finished.append(pruned)

    return finished