Re: Adding a "plugin" parser to ifile

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Jason Rennie wrote:

>
> [email protected] said:
> > - I've been messing about with various ifile options "-h -w -k"[1] and
> > I'm coming to the conclusion that it would be quite useful to
> > customize the parser for ifile. While you can do this in front of
> > ifile, I think as a first pass it would be convient to provide a
> > "subprocess parser".
>
> Let me propose something here.  How about we break ifile into two parts:
> the parsing/lexing part and the classifier.  To run ifile, you'd give the
> message to the first program and pipe the output to the second program.
> The first program could output one token per line.  Then the lexing part
> of the classifier would be exceedingly simple.  Breaking it apart like
> this would make it easier for people to experiment with different parsing/
> lexing styles; it would even make it possible to write prototype parsers/
> lexers in perl or some language that's easier to write.
>
> Thoughts?
>

- I think that would be great! After looking at the lexing code
at bit I realize it's not quite as simple as I thought to plug
in the kind of lexer/parser I'm thinking about. If there's
anything I can do to help let me know.

_ It seems to me that you could turn the current ifile into the
second program quite trivially, and the first program would
essentially be ifile_email_parser ? Perhaps a good first step
in this direction would be just adding a "raw" parse mode to
the current ifile.

ifile -r

ifile expects the tokens to appear one per line and does no
special processing. Should be used with some preprocessor.

Actually, this could already be done with the -w option. Hmm,
this has given me some food for thought.

- Booker C. Bense