Best parsing module to use?

supergiantrobot has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a text translation problem to solve. That is, I want to take some text with simple markup and produce other text in another form of markup. The original text looks something like this:

HEAD: LAMP Post

DECK: Burn the Bulb Brighter

AUTHOR: Joe Smith

This is I<some> sample text. It uses a few pieces of markup such as C<
+courier>, C<I<courier italics>>, B<bold>, and I<italics.>

Some time there is 

C<
long 
sections of code
>

or 

I<
Long quotes 
that appears in blocks
>

There can also be figures, such as I<Figure One.>

[ BEGIN FIGURE ONE: This is a caption with I<italics> ]

[ INSERT sample.jpg ]

[ END FIGURE ONE ]

Etc. 

BIO: John Smith
[download]

For sake of discussion, imagine I want to produce HTML (but I also want to be able to produce Quark and InDesign markup, too). I definitely want to maintain a map of original tags to new tags, and have that list be dynamic so I can emit a variety of formats.

I have something working with Parse::RecDescent. I chose it because of the possibility of embedded tags, such as C<I<courier italics.>> However, I am wondering if there is some other module I should consider using? Text::Balanced? A modified HTML parser?

Suggestions? Martin

Comment on Best parsing module to use? Download Code

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Re: Best parsing module to use? by kvale (Monsignor) on Apr 19, 2004 at 15:41 UTC
Given the language element `[ INSERT sample.jpg` [download] I think Text::Balanced will not be a good solution because the square brackets are not always balanced in your example. The markup doesn't really look like HTML either; there are no closing or empty tags anywhere. As you demonstrate, there is the possibility of arbitrary nesting at least a few levels deep, so doing the whole thing with a regex would be a mess. If anything, this format has a resemblance to POD. If I were approaching your parsing problem, I would create a grammar first. I would then either use Parse::RecDescent if speed is not an issue, or create a hand-crafted parser if it was. -Mark	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Best parsing module to use? by supergiantrobot (Acolyte) on Apr 19, 2004 at 16:49 UTC
I missed some of the right brackets in my sample code. My apologies. Everything should be balanced. I wonder if switching to POD would help... but, nesting might make that difficult.	[reply]
Re: Best parsing module to use? by samtregar (Abbot) on Apr 19, 2004 at 18:31 UTC
I have something working with Parse::RecDescent. That's what I would use, unless parser performance is important. Any reason not just keep using it? -sam	[reply]