title: Alternatives for regex in Python
body: <p>Regular expressions are highly unreadable and difficult to debug. Does there exist any replacement for text processing which could be handled by mere mortals?</p>
  
  <p>Criteria include</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>It's a library or a tool (please point the answer to the library itself)</p></li>
  <li><p>Human readable syntax (no cheatsheets needed)</p></li>
  <li><p>Documentation with examples</p></li>
  <li><p>Able to debug expressions</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>If possible can you mention language specific and language independent solutions. I am mainly developing on Python, but I'd hope to see a library which could be ported to other languages/platforms.</p>
  
  <p>I once read that Haskell would have nice text processing capabilities, but again, this is a built-in language solution, not a generic solution.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> Please do not give answers "regular expressions are not bad, do like this!" Stackoverflow.com is not a place for subjective opinions, but I think a regular expressions are bad and I want to see my alternative options for using them.</p>