How do I process a nested list?
- by ddbeck
Suppose I have a bulleted list like this:
* list item 1
* list item 2 (a parent)
** list item 3 (a child of list item 2)
** list item 4 (a child of list item 2 as well)
*** list item 5 (a child of list item 4 and a grand-child of list item 2)
* list item 6
I'd like to parse that into a nested list or some other data structure which makes the parent-child relationship between elements explicit (rather than depending on their contents and relative position). For example, here's a list of tuples containing an item and a list of its children (and so forth):
[('list item 1',),
('list item 2', [('list item 3',), [('list item 4', [('list item 5'),]]
('list item 6',)]
I've attempted to do this with plain Python and some experimentation with Pyparsing, but I'm not making progress. I'm left with two major questions:
What's the strategy I need to employ to make this work? I know recursion is part of the solution, but I'm having a hard time making the connection between this and, say, a Fibonacci sequence.
I'm certain I'm not the first person to have done this, but I don't know the terminology of the problem to make fruitful searches for more information on this topic. What problems are related to this so that I can learn more about solving these kinds of problems in general?
