parsing parenthesized list in python's imaplib

Question

I am looking for simple way to split parenthesized lists that come out of IMAP responses into Python lists or tuples. I want to go from

\'(BODYSTRUCTURE (\"t         


        

Answer 1

The fact that there's nested tuples makes this impossible with a regex. You'll have to write a parser to denote when you're inside a parenthesis or not.

You could try

tuple('(BODYSTRUCTURE ("text" "plain" ("charset" "ISO-8859-1") NIL NIL "quoted-printable" 1207 50 NIL NIL NIL NIL))'.replace("NIL", "None").split(' '))

Edit: Well I got something that works with your example, not sure it's what you want though.

BODYSTRUCTURE needs to be defined somewhere.

eval(",".join([a for a in '(BODYSTRUCTURE ("text" "plain" ("charset" "ISO-8859-1") NIL NIL "quoted-printable" 1207 50 NIL NIL NIL NIL))'.replace("NIL", "None").split(' ')]))