Without knowing anything about what you do aside from what you've written here, it seems like you've fallen into the same trap that most folks who move from Perl to Python fall into. They are used to having the swiss army knife of string tools with regex, and don't know what to do when handed the complete toolchest of specialized string tools that Python provides.
I do a fair amount of text parsing in Python for my job, and only very rarely import the regular expression module - because most of the time I don't need it. My code is faster and more easily read for it, as well.
Could you please explain how I don't know anything about what I do aside from what I've written?(I don't know how you make such a comment without knowing anything about me).
And what are those specialized toolchest of string tools that Python offers? I have clearly explained(In comments above and below) Perl's 'tool chest', now can you please explain how Python 'tool chest' beats it?
Seems, languages like Python and Java are best when all your application needs a glue between one part of architecture(webserver, UI etc) and other(database, XML, JSON). Or at maximum some extra stuff like sockets.
The problem with Python sort of languages starts when you alter you inputs and outputs such that they are no longer standard and structured. All examples that Python folks give as superiority of Python over Perl come around in areas where data input is structured enough. Things like scientific computing, web programming(Interaction with databases, XML, JSON).
There are a lot of languages which can do this, The actual challenge is in areas dealing with unstructured data. There are very few languages which offer convenient tools to deal with those sort of problems.
Did you really misunderstand your parent? Strictly speaking "without knowing..." should refer to the subject of the main clause, but it is clear that he (your parent) intendend himself to be understood as the potentially ignorant person.
I do a fair amount of text parsing in Python for my job, and only very rarely import the regular expression module - because most of the time I don't need it. My code is faster and more easily read for it, as well.