Re: Table-driven Parser

"Paul Mann" <paul@parsetec.com>
2 Oct 2005 02:49:44 -0400

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From: "Paul Mann" <paul@parsetec.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 2 Oct 2005 02:49:44 -0400
Organization: Compilers Central
Keywords: parse
Posted-Date: 02 Oct 2005 02:49:44 EDT

> I read in Microsoft's documentation that most RTF parsers are table
> driven. To me that doesn't say much. I then downloaded their test app
> which has a horde of lines making up tables, but doesn't seem to do
> anything meaningful. Certainly, it is not building any kind of DOM or
> giving me any of the info I would need to render it on-screen.


Microsoft uses YACC internally for some projects. YACC is a
table-driven parser. The tables don't do anything by themselves,
without the parser engine. Other tools have been developed that are
more modern than YACC, but Microsoft so far has not shown much
interest in state-of-the-art when it comes to parser generators.


> Cobus Kruger


> [I've written RTF to HTML translators which tokenize the RTF and then
> do a lot of ad-hoc stuff to figure out what it means. RTF never
> struck me as having enough of a structure to merit a real parser, and
> I definitely sympathize with the gotcha tags problem. -John]


HTML is based on tags and it is doable with table-driven parsers. It
is not simple though.


Paul Mann
http://parsetec.com

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