Extending struct.unpack to produce nested tuples

[Matthew Barnes]

I was wondering if there would be any interest in extending the
struct.unpack format notation to be able to express groups of data
with parenthesis.

For example:

data = struct.pack('ii ii', 1, 2, 3, 4)
struct.unpack(' i(ii)i', data) # Note the parentheses

(1, (2, 3), 4)

Use Case: I have a program written in C that contains a bunch of
aggregate data structures (arrays of structs, structs containing
arrays, etc.) and I'm transmitting these structures over a socket
connection to a Python program that then unpacks the data using the
struct module. Problem is that I have to unpack the incoming data as
a flat sequence of data elements, and then repartition the sequence
into nested sequences to better reflect how the data is structured in
the C program. It would be more convenient to express these groupings
as I'm unpacking the raw data.

I'm sure there are plenty of other use cases for such a feature.

Matthew Barnes