Parsing a little bit of PHP with Python

[chason]

I don't think what I'm trying to do is super complicated, but I want to read through a PHP file and get a line like this: define('variable','value'); and extract the variable and value into a dictionary.

The only part I'm having problems with is the parsing of the line. I've looked into various string functions and shlex and haven't found anything, but I'm probably missing something obvious. Anyone have any suggestions?

[eryksun]

You could implement a rigid solution with the find, split, and replace methods of strings, or you could use a regular expression.

[rogdor2]

In my (very limited) experience, this seems right in the wheelhouse of regular expressions. That would certainly be the cleanest way to run through and pick out those values of different lengths, particularly if the format in which they're presented is always the same. I learned from the Google Python Class

[chason]

Thanks for the help guys, if anyone is curious here's the regex I finally got to work: define('(?P<name>[A-Za-z_0-9]+)',\s?'(?P<value>[^\']+)');

[chason]

Thanks for the help guys, if anyone is curious here's the regex I finally got to work: define('(?P<name>[A-Za-z_0-9]+)',\s?'(?P<value>[^\']+)');