Converting CNC drillings from old to new system (using Python)

I have this kind of file (part):

H DX=615 DY=425 DZ=22.15 -AB C=0 T=0 R=999 *MM /"def" BX=2.5 BY=452.5 BZ=25 ;M20150710.

XBO X=100 Y=50 Z=5 V=1000 R=0 x=0 y=0 D=10 N="P" F=1 ;Test F1/10P.

...

which I want to convert to a new programming system. What I want to do is first read the header (H) and put the DX, DY and DZ values in respectively named variables. I managed to do this, but when I came to process my XBO line (a drilling, from which I need X, Y, Z, V, R, x, y, D, N, F and ;, also in separate variables) my code started looking very ugly very fast.

So I started over, and came up with this:

f = open("input.xxl") # open input file
for line in f:
    if Debug==1: print line
    for char in line:
        charbuffr=charbuffr+char
        if "H" in charbuffr:
            if Debug==1: print'HEADER found!'
            charbuffr=""           
        if "XBO" in charbuffr:
            if Debug==1: print'XBO found!'
            charbuffr=""       

This correctly identifies the separate commands H and XBO, but I'm kind of stuck now. I can use the same method to extract all the variables, from loops inside the H and XBO loops, but this does not seem like good coding...

Can anyone set me on the right foot please? I don't want a full solution, as I love coding (well my main job is coding for CNC machines, which seems easy now compared to Python), but would love to know which approach is best...

Instead of converting data types by hand, you could use ast. literal_eval. This helper function takes a list of the form ['a=2', 'b="abc"'] and converts into a dictionary {'a': 2, 'b': 'abc'}:

import ast

def dict_from_row(row):
    """Convert a list of strings in the form 'name=value' into a dict."""
    res = []
    for entry in row:
        name, value = entry.split('=')
        res.append('"{name}": {value}'.format(name=name, value=value))
    dict_string = '{{{}}}'.format(', '.join(res))
    return ast.literal_eval(dict_string)

Now parsing the file becomes a bit simpler:

for line in f:
    row = line.split()
    if not row:
        continue
    if row[0] == 'H':
        header = dict_from_row(row[1:4])
    elif line[0] == 'XBO':
        xbo = dict_from_row(row[1:11])

Results:

>>> header
{'DX': 615, 'DY': 425, 'DZ': 22.15}

>>> xbo
{'D': 10, 'F': 1, 'R': 0, 'V': 1000, 'X': 100, 'Y': 50, 'Z': 5, 'x': 0, 'y': 0}