use Perl

• Someone write Wiki::TextParser kplsthnx (Score:2, Interesting)

  by Kake (3534)

  Must admit to being an idiot in that it took me quite a while to figure out what thingy to click to reply to this.

  We talked about this on IRC and I agreed with you. I went and looked at HTML::Parser, which I think we figured out was a good model for what we want to be able to do with WikiText. It's all in XS, so I ran away. Bad move? Me no spik C.

  Kake
• Better Alternatives??? (Score:3, Interesting)

  by jcavanaugh (1007) on 2003.02.19 20:42 (#17260)

  Have you looked at the source for TWiki?? Its regexp based as well. I realize that regexp based parsing/expanding is a primitive mechanism and painfully slow at times. However, its also pretty darn powerful as well. Im interested in your thoughts on how to make a better parser/renderer for something like TWiki a reality. --John Cavanaugh

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  • Re:Better Alternatives??? (Score:1)

    by sbwoodside (3935)

    Powerful? Sure, in that it can do a lot. No, in that it doesn't help the software understand the structure of the data at all. Regex is a very limited language.
  • Re:Better Alternatives??? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Matts (1087)

    The problem with Twiki's parser (and all the other ones) is they all look something like this:

      $text =~ s/someformatting1/<somehtml1>$1<\/somehtml1>/;
      $text =~ s/someformatting2/<somehtml2>$1<\/somehtml2>/;
      $text =~ s/someformatting3/<somehtml3>$1<\/somehtml3>/;
      $text =~ s/someformatting4/<somehtml4>$1<\/somehtml4>/;
      $text =~ s/someformatting5/<somehtml5>$1<\/somehtml5>/;

    Which is great if you want HTML, but what if y
• Three Reasons (Score:3, Insightful)

  by chromatic (983) on 2003.02.19 21:05 (#17261) Homepage Journal

  • Writing a proper parser is hard
  • We're not as smart as you are
  • A terrible regex implementation that gets the job done pretty well today is a heckofalot better than a beautiful, perfect event-based parser that isn't here yet

  I'm only about halfway kidding.

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  • Re:Three Reasons (Score:2)

    by Matts (1087)

    I agree with all your points but the second one ;-)
    
    Since Text::WikiFormat::SAX doesn't work properly I'm obviously not as smart as you think I am ;-)
    
    But in all seriousness this is something I hope to put right, in a similar way to trying to put right the whole XML parser nonesense. That way I can put my code where my rant is, or something like that.
• and they use different regexes! (Score:3, Insightful)

  by kellan (905) on 2003.02.19 22:50 (#17267) Homepage Journal

  I might almost forgive them if they implemented the same regex, but each person implementing a different regex based "mini-language" is the worst.
  
  Maybe its not too late to get gnat to include recipes on using Parse::Yapp, and Parse::RecDescent in the next cookbook.

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  • Re:and they use different regexes! (Score:2)

    by gnat (29)

    P::RD and P::Y will be there ...

    --Nat