This is a benchmark of some of the available Python parser tools as of May 2013.

The following upfront criteria were used to select the candidates:

1] Pure Python 2] Works on Python 2.6 - 3.3 3] Uses a straightforward and well-understood parser type (this is of course subjective) 4] Maintained somewhat currently - it should have a somewhat obvious and active community around it (again, subjective) 5] Is licensing compatible to be distributed with astropy

Tools tested:

• pyparsing
• PLY

Tools on the short list to try next:

• parsing

Tools ruled out because they didn't meet the above criteria:

• PyPEG (no Python 2.6 support)
• Parsely (no Python 3.x support)
• YAPPS (no Python 3.x support)
• ANTLR (requires running a Java-based preprocessing step)
• aperiot (no Python 2.6 support)
• pydsl (GPL'd, no Python 2.6 support)
• lepl (self-declared unsupported)
• Rparse (GPL)
• CodeTalker (Cython-based, no Python 3.x support)

For a good resource of parsers, see:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/LanguageParsing http://nedbatchelder.com/text/python-parsers.html