ot: parsing math equations

[Tyler Spivey]

sorry if this's off topic, but here goes:
i'm writing a program in python to do varius math things.
factoring, radicals, etc. but my major limitation is that it can't
do anything with algebra equations.
2x^2+3x+4x-x+3y
etc...
would a regular expression be the answer for breaking these down into there
component parts?
or do I need a full-blown parser for doing that?
probably  the parser - but i'm not sure if any python based solutions exist.
they do, but I'm not sure if they are what i want.
i don't want to do any complex coding. this's just a spare-time project for
getting homework done faster, and i don't want to spend hours and hours on
it. it's currently topped almost 10k, but most of that are the docs
contained in one very long tripple-quoted string.
and all this coming from the guy who previously hated python without really
trying it first...