Hey all, I'm a recdescent newbie, so please cut me some slack ;) I've got a ~1.5Mb file that I'm parsing. The grammar is pretty well established, in such that it's from a formal paper, and has EBNF notation written about it. I've looked at the EBNF notation, and done my best to simplify it. In other words, EBNF says some number should be from 0-65535, so I just specify /\d{1,5}/ to simplify & speed up the processing.
W/ the first set of working grammar (tested using a subset of the file), and it has about 85 separate rules. I tried running it on the "full" file, but it just took too damn long. So, I went about creating a much simpler parser (even dumber), so I could do some pre-parsing, to speed things up. The file looks like: (foo bar) (foo (bar baz)) (foo "bar") (foo (bar "baz") And these levels of data could be several levels deep w/ data. E.g.: (foo (bar baz) (baz baz) (baz (baz (baz(baz "bar"))))) So, I dumbed down my grammar (as can be seen below) but it still takes longer than I have patience for ( > 10 minutes) to parse. Am I SOL with parsing this file use RecDescent or is something glaringly bad w/ the below syntax? TIA --dw ############################################################ # The main file has a header, and one or more object models File : Header Model(s) # Define what the header is Header: "(" /Header[\s]v[\d]+\.[\d]+\.[\d]+\.[\d]+/ ")" | <error: Invalid Header> # Define what the object model is Model: "(Model" Item(s) ")" | <error: Invalid parse of the ObjectModel> Item: "(" /\b[^\s]+\b/ /[^\(\)]*/ Item(s?) ")" # Simply two tokens | "(" /\b[^\s]+\b/ "\"" /[^\"]*/ "\"" Item(s?) ")" | <error> # These items left in for clarity's sake. Functionally equivalent # to Item above, but hopefully faster OldItem: "(" Label Data Item(s?) ")" # Simply two tokens | "(" Label QuotedData Item(s?) ")" | <error> Label: /\b[^\s]+\b/ Data: /[^\(\)]*/ QuotedData: "\"" /[^\"]*/ "\"" ############################################################