Description
Our world is filled with languages: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, INI, YAML, XML, XPath, MarkDown and more custom languages like Atlassians Jira JQL, Doctrines DQL and Behats Gherkin language.
And other structured texts like date formats, Googles search syntax, Apache Configuration files and the HTTP protocol request and response. Large code bases, meta programming and the upcoming Domain Specific Modeling field make it imperative that we as developers are capable of reading and interpreting these languages. During this talk an introduction will be given to parsing. Terms like 'formal grammar', 'lexing / scanning', 'LL / LALR / PEG' will be explained and put into context. We will look at a recursive descent parsing as a practical way to parse languages. Finally the audience will be left with ways to get started with parsing structured text into memory. After this session the audience will never make the mistake of parsing HTML with regular expressions again!
