Parsing with the Spark module

Spark is a powerful and general parser/compiler framework written in Python. In some respects, Spark offers more than SimpleParse or other Python parsers. Being pure Python, however, it is also slower. This article discusses the Spark module, with code samples, an explanation of its usage, and suggestions for its areas of application. This article also follows an earlier article of the "Charming Python" series which introduces some basic concepts in parsing and discusses the Spark module. Parsing frameworks are a rich topic that warrants quite a bit of study to get the full picture; these two articles are a good place to start.