It's pretty horrible, but this adds support for parentheses inside the `full_eval` function: from itertools import takewhile, dropwhile def split_paren(ex

It's pretty horrible, but this adds support for parentheses inside the `full_eval` function: from itertools import takewhile, dropwhile def split_paren(expr): left = ''.join(takewhile(lambda c: c != '(', expr)) right = ''.join(takewhile(lambda c: c != ')', expr[::-1]))[::-1] inside = ''.join(dropwhile(lambda c: c != ')', ''.join(dropwhile(lambda c: c != '(', expr))[::-1]))[::-1][1:-1] return left, inside, right def full_eval(expr): if '(' in expr: left, inside, right = split_paren(expr) return full_eval(left + str(full_eval(inside)) + right) else: return calc(expr)