Overall, Python provides a lot of features for free that might require costly third-party libraries in other languages. If you've done some sort of programming before, you'll find that Python is extremely easy to learn and lets you do a lot with a small amount of code. To try the code in this article, install a copy of Python for your distribution of Linux. Thus far, I've pulled in some libraries that give me string, url downloading, and regular expression functions. Then, I defined two regular expressions.
Regular expressions are analagous to keys.
Put simplistically, the regular expression is moved down the string one character at a time, similarly to trying a key on a hallway full of doors. When the regular expression matches, the door is opened. After that, I downloaded some test data from the USCF web site to play with. Here, I'm using the regular expression that I defined earlier to search the string for a match. Then, I used the string slicing to grab that chunk of the data.