Re: Balancing Parens

[lhoward]

Have you considered using Parse::RecDescent? It implements a full-featured recursive-descent parser. A real parser (as opposed to parsing a string with a regular expression alone) is much more powerful and can be more apropriate for parsing highly structured/nested data like you have. I'm not sure exactly what you want to do with the line after you parse it, so my example below does't do anything with the data it parses, but it should be a good starting point if you want to try using Parse::RecDescent to parse your data. (it has been a while since I've written a grammer so it may look a bit rough).

use Parse::RecDescent;
my $teststr="blah1,blah2(blah3,blah4(blah5,blah6(blah7))),blah8";
my $grammar = q {
        content:        /[^\)\(\,]+/
        function:       content '(' list ')'
        value:          content
        item:           function | value
        list:           item ',' list | item
        startrule:      list
};
my $parser = new Parse::RecDescent ($grammar) or die "Bad grammar!\n";
defined $parser->startrule($teststr) or print "Bad text!\n";

[merlyn]

Simplifying the grammar, we get:

use Parse::RecDescent;  
my $teststr="blah1,blah2(blah3,blah4(blah5,blah6(blah7))),blah8";  
my $grammar = q {
list: <leftop: item ',' item> 
item: word '(' list ')' <commit>
  | word 
word: /\w+/  
};  
my $parser = new Parse::RecDescent ($grammar) or die "Bad grammar!\n";
+  
defined $parser->list($teststr) or print "Bad text!\n";

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[swiftone]

Thank you, this appears to be just what I was looking for. It may not be more efficient for this first part, but it looks like it can do 90% of the parsing (of the entire format, not just this one part) for me. I've never worked with yacc-like parsers, so this will be a new experiment for me. Once again, thanks!

[Anonymous Monk]

If you've never worked with parsers swifie, check out the antipodean wizard Damian Conway's article in TPJ on Parse::RecDecent entitled The man(1) of descent. At 13 pages, this must be the longest article ever in TPJ!

[perlcgi]

aRRGH! Forgot to login again, that was me perlcgi o swiftone.