parsing nested parentheses in python, grab content by level

Question

Apparently this problem comes up fairly often, after reading

Regular expression to detect semi-colon terminated C++ for & while loops

and thinking about

Answer 1

You don't make it clear exactly what the specification of your function is, but this behaviour seems wrong to me:

>>> ParseNestedParen('(a)(b)(c)', 0)
['a)(b)(c']
>>> nested_paren.ParseNestedParen('(a)(b)(c)', 1)
['b']
>>> nested_paren.ParseNestedParen('(a)(b)(c)', 2)
['']

Other comments on your code:

• Docstring says "generate", but function returns a list, not a generator.
• Since only one string is ever returned, why return it in a list?
• Under what circumstances can the function return the string fail?
• Repeatedly calling re.findall and then throwing away the result is wasteful.
• You attempt to rebalance the parentheses in the string, but you do so only one parenthesis at a time:

>>> ParseNestedParen(')' * 1000, 1)
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object

As Thomi said in the question you linked to, "regular expressions really are the wrong tool for the job!"

---

The usual way to parse nested expressions is to use a stack, along these lines:

def parenthetic_contents(string):
    """Generate parenthesized contents in string as pairs (level, contents)."""
    stack = []
    for i, c in enumerate(string):
        if c == '(':
            stack.append(i)
        elif c == ')' and stack:
            start = stack.pop()
            yield (len(stack), string[start + 1: i])

>>> list(parenthetic_contents('(a(b(c)(d)e)(f)g)'))
[(2, 'c'), (2, 'd'), (1, 'b(c)(d)e'), (1, 'f'), (0, 'a(b(c)(d)e)(f)g')]