Unexpected parsing failure when a section header contains a trailing colon

[CarlossShi]

Consider the following instance (saved by Problem.render - tsplib95/models.py, which uses a dictionary-like format):

NAME: example
TYPE: TSP
DIMENSION: 3
EDGE_WEIGHT_TYPE: EXACT_2D
NODE_COORD_SECTION:
1 0.8554288744926453 0.7658464312553406
2 1.0 0.4734724760055542
3 0.10046596825122833 0.5560271739959717
EOF

Although the trailing colon after _SECTION is not commonly used, several other libraries/parsers I use handle it without problems:

1. Problem.parse - tsplib95/models.py: use regular expression
2. ReadProblem - LKH3/SRC/ReadProblem.c: extract the key using strtok
3. CCutil_gettsplib - concorde/UTIL/getdata.c: replace the colon with a space

However, vrplib currently fails to parse this file because in parse_section, the parser checks for the colon before checking *_SECTION headers:

VRPLIB/vrplib/parse/parse_vrplib.py

Lines 74 to 78 in e4d2197

	if ":" in line:
	specs.append(line)
	elif "_SECTION" in line:
	start = lines.index(line)
	end_section = start + 1

Would it be possible to swap the order of the corresponding elif blocks in parse_section, so that *_SECTION headers are recognized even when they contain a trailing colon?

[N-Wouda]

Hi @CarlossShi,

Thanks for opening this issue. We hadn't seen a trailing colon on sections before, but it should not be too hard to also handle that case gracefully.

Would it be possible to swap the order of the corresponding elif blocks in parse_section, so that *_SECTION headers are recognized even when they contain a trailing colon?

I think that's the easiest way to support this, yes. We'll make this work soon!

[leonlan]

Hi @CarlossShi, support for section names that contain a trailing colon has been added to vrplib's newest version, v2.1.0.