[Israel.pm] Sophisticated text processing tools

[Jason Elbaum]

Gaal Yahas wrote:

> Take a look at the pos function, and the \G regexp metacharacter.

I will. Thanks.


> But if you're doing source code analysis and you want it to be robust,
> you really need a parser.

I'd like to see how far I can get without one first.

> (I hope you're not trying to parse Perl.)

Worse - C++.

> Parse::RecDescent comes with a c grammar, if that's what you're after;
> grammars for Java and C++ I'm sure are available online.

Last time I tried using the C grammar from Parse::RecDescent, it failed 
miserably. In any case, C++ is horribly difficult to parse, since the 
syntactical meaning of an identifier depends on the contents of the 
symbol table. There are very few complete open source C++ parsers 
available anywhere, and they are pretty much all written in C or C++. 
Since the code changes I need to make are local, I'm hopeful that I can 
do without a parser. Assuming the code is reasonably conventional, I 
(hopefully) won't need to be able to parse it.


> In some cases
> you'll get by with straight regexps but that's only if your source is
> strictly formatted.

I don't expect the code to be strictly formatted. That's why I'm looking 
for more powerful tools than regexps.


Thanks,


Jason