It is pretty difficult to answer you with the litlle information you give us, but I'll try anyway ;--(

If the data is not SGML, XML or HTML I don't think you should try to use SGML/XML/HTML tools on it. SGML and XML tools will simply not accept the data, and HTML tools will try their best, but their guess may not be what you expect.

It really depends on the format of your data files, but I would probably try to first convert the data to XML, using regexps, and then use XML tools which are usually pretty fast. But that's because I am used to processing XML, and my output is usually either XML or HTML, so an XML transformation gives me the result I want.

Also, the problem with your finite state machine may be the tokenizer. If you scan the input one character at a time, C-style, this may not be optimal, tokenizing using regexps may be faster.

In reply to Re: Parsing SGML-ish Data Files by mirod
in thread Parsing SGML-ish Data Files by coolmichael

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.