Parsing input is something most developers run into one day. Parsing binary input can be pretty straight-forward, as most of the time you know the format of the input, ie you know what to expect: if you receive a message of 10 bytes, the first byte could be a message ID, the second one the payload length, third one message type ID, and others message content. Pretty easy to handle.
Parsing human-readable text can be harder though, as human beings tend to be less strict when providing input (eg whitespacing), you can’t ask humans to prepend strings with their length, etc.
There are several ways to handle text input. One well-known method is using regular expressions with matches, but writing regular expressions which are able to process not-so-strict input can be pretty though, writing expressions to parse large bodies of text is hard, using sub-expressions can become pretty complicated,… Overall regular expressions usually involve quite a lot of black magic for the average outsider.
Luckily, there are easier methods to parse text input too, of which I’d like to introduct one: a Python module called Pyparsing, which can do BNF-style text parsing.
First of all, let me explain “BNF”. The Backus-Naur Form, aka BNF, is a metasyntax you can use to express the grammar of a formal language. This might make no sense at all, so let’s split it up:
