Fortran Format Statements and Regular Expressions

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

One of our learners has a large number of Fortran format statements embedded in a program he's inherited, and would like to come up with equivalent regular expressions in order to parse the program's data with tools written in other languages. If you know of a tool to translate one into the other, or a Fortran-to-regexp dictionary, we'd welcome a pointer.