Parsing apache log files

This is a job for regular expressions.

For example:

line="172.16.0.3 - - [25/Sep/2002:14:04:19 +0200] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 401 - "" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827""
regex = '([(\d\.)]+) - - \[(.*?)\] "(.*?)" (\d+) - "(.*?)" "(.*?)"'

import re
print re.match(regex, line).groups()

The output would be a tuple with 6 pieces of information from the line (specifically, the groups within parentheses in that pattern):

('172.16.0.3', '25/Sep/2002:14:04:19 +0200', 'GET / HTTP/1.1', '401', '', 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020827')

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