Tutorials and issues on all aspects of creating software to analyse code
In the field of parsing Lex and Yacc, as well as their respective successors flex and GNU Bison, have a sort of venerable status. And you could still use them today. But you should not do that. In this article will explain why they have problems and show you some alternatives. Lex and Yacc were […]
Welcome to a tutorial on Pyleri, aka Python Left-Right Parser, a simple parsing tool. To use it when you need something more than a regular expression, but less than a full parser generator. In this tutorial we are going to show you how to use the tool and the basics of parsing. Why Learning Pyleri? […]
Data is a core resource for many activities. One important challenge for handling data is storing the data in the right way. We need to choose a format that makes easy solving the problem at hand. When multiple problems are being solved using the same data, that could mean that the same data has to […]
ANTLR can generate parsers in many languages: Java, C#, Python (2 and 3), JavaScript, Go, Swift, and C++. We have written an article to use an ANTLR C# parser and we have also written a mega tutorial to teach you how to use ANTLR with Java, C#, Python and JavaScript. In this article we are […]
What Can You Do With Natural Language Processing? Natural Language Processing (NLP) comprises a set of techniques to work with documents written in a natural language to achieve many different objectives. They range from simple ones that any developer can implement, to extremely complex ones that require a lot of expertise. The following table illustrate […]
We have already introduced a few parsing terms, while listing the major tools and libraries used for parsing in Java, C#, Python and JavaScript. In this article we make a more in-depth presentation of the concepts and algorithms used in parsing, so that you can get a better understanding of this fascinating world. We have […]
HTML is a markup language with a simple structure. It would be quite easy to build a parser for HTML with a parser generator. Actually, you may not need even to do that, if you choose a popular parser generator, like ANTLR. That is because there are already available grammars ready to be used. HTML […]
The EBNF is the most commonly used formalism to describe the structure of languages. In this article we are going to see: What the EBNF Examples of grammars defined with EBNF How we can define a grammar using EBNF A few things to consider when using EBNF How to use EBNF in practice today A summary […]
This is an article similar to a previous one we wrote: Parsing in Java, so the introduction is the same. Skip to chapter 3 if you have already read it. If you need to parse a language, or document, from Python there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem: use an existing library supporting […]
This is an article similar to a previous one we wrote: Parsing in Java, so the introduction is the same. Skip to chapter 3 if you have already read it. If you need to parse a language, or document, from JavaScript there are fundamentally three ways to solve the problem: use an existing library supporting […]
We can design parsers for new languages, or rewrite parsers for existing languages built in house.
On top of parsers we can then help building interpreters, compilers, code generators, documentation generators, or translators (code converters) to other languages.