Building Parsers with Java

Parser building is a powerful programming technique that opens a world of opportunity for designing how users interact with applications. By creating mini-languages, you can precisely address the requirements of your application development domain. Writing your own parsers empowers you to access a database more effectively than SQL to efficiently control the movement of an order through its workflow, to command the actions of a robot, and to control access privileges to transactions in a system. The repertoire of today's professional programmer should include the know-how to create custom languages.

Building Parsers with Java(TM) shows how to create parsers that recognize custom programming languages. This book and its accompanying CD provide an in-depth explanation and clearly written tutorial on writing parsers, following the Interpreter Design Pattern. An easy-to-follow demonstration on how to apply parsers to vital development tasks is included, using more than a hundred short examples, numerous UML diagrams, and a pure Java parser toolkit to illustrate key points.

You will learn

• How to design, code, and test a working parser
• How to create a parser to read a data language, and how to create new computer languages with XML
• How to translate the design of a language into code
• How to accept an arithmetic formula and compute its result
• How to accept and apply matching expressions like th* one
• How to use tokenizers to define a parser in terms of logical nuggets instead of individual characters
• How to build parsers for a custom logic language like Prolog
• How to build parsers for a custom query language that goes beyond SQL
• How to construct an imperative language that translates text into commands that direct a sequence of actions

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