This is just what I was looking for. A basic technique that doesn't use the ugly nested (or, as Ovid says, "ad-hoc") tokenizing that mine has. Many thanks, and I wish I had the power to upvote you for that!

Update: just so there are no misunderstandings, I appreciate all the other replies too. I will look at them and try to glean some useful information. But ikegami's reply was just the kind of basic jump-start I was looking for.

Another update: I've moved the token names and patterns into an array that I loop on, rather than hard coding the logic. I also implemented a simple indentation scheme. Here it is, if anyone is interested:

my @tokens = (
    { name => 'group_begin', pattern => qr({)            },
    { name => 'group_end',   pattern => qr(})            },
    { name => 'escape',      pattern => qr(\\[^\\{}\s]+) },
    { name => 'text',        pattern => qr([^\\{}]+)     },
);

my $indent = 0;

TOKENLOOP: {
    for (@tokens) {
        if ($text =~ /\G($_->{pattern})/gc) {
            (my $token = $1) =~ s/\n/[\\n]/g;
            $indent-- if $token eq "}";
            print "  " x $indent, "->$token<-\n";
            $indent++ if $token eq "{";
            redo TOKENLOOP;
        }
    }
}

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In reply to Re^2: Basics of parsing (using RTF as a testbed) by Mugatu
in thread Basics of parsing (using RTF as a testbed) by Mugatu

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