Using a third-party tool—parse

While manually parsing data, as seen in the previous recipe, works very well for small strings, it can be very laborious to tweak the exact formula to work with a variety of input. What if the input has an extra dash sometimes? Or it has a variable length header depending on the size of one of the fields?

A more advanced option is to use regular expressions, as we'll see in the next recipe. But there's a great module in Python called parse (https://github.com/r1chardj0n3s/parse) that allows us to reverse format strings. It is a fantastic tool, that's powerful, easy to use, and greatly improves the readability of the code.