Greetings Monks,

Straightforward problem, I have a database that uses the following syntax for boolean searches: "word1 word2" will find either word 1 or 2, "+word1 +word2" will find both and "+word1 -word2" will find 1 and not 2; etc, simple enough... just try explaining that to anyone using it though.

So what I need to do is convert the more familiar "(word1 AND word2) OR word3" syntax to this one (btw, parenthesis work the same way in both).

From whatever knowledge of CS I have I understand that this is pretty much beyond what regular expressions can do, but it also seems like doing some sort of parse tree would be overkill (plus I don't really know how to go about it) - any suggestions for a pragmatic approach to this?

In reply to converting a boolean syntax by glwtta

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