What's the best way to explain parsing to a new programmer?

Posted by Daisetsu on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Daisetsu
Published on 2010-05-28T23:55:19Z Indexed on 2010/05/29 0:02 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 502

Filed under:

best-practices

|

parsing

|

new

I am a college student getting my Computer Science degree. A lot of my fellow students really haven't done a lot of programming. They've done their class assignments, but let's be honest here those questions don't really teach you how to program.

I have had several other students ask me questions about how to parse things, and I'm never quite sure how to explain it to them. Is it best to start just going line by line looking for substrings, or just give them the more complicated lecture about using proper lexical analysis, etc. to create tokens, use BNF, and all of that other stuff? They never quite understand it when I try to explain it.

What's the best approach to explain this without confusing them or discouraging them from actually trying.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about best-practices

Batch Best Practices and Technical Best Practices Updated

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
The Batch Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products (Doc Id: 836362.1) and Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products (Doc Id: 560367.1) have been updated with updated and new advice for the various versions of the Oracle… >>> More
Partial template specialization of free functions - best practices

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
As most C++ programmers should know, partial template specialization of free functions is disallowed. For example, the following is illegal C++: template <class T, int N> T mul(const T& x) { return x * N; } template <class T> T mul<T, 0>(const T& x) { return T(0); } //… >>> More
Object Oriented PHP Best Practices

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Say I have a class which represents a person, a variable within that class would be $name. Previously, In my scripts I would create an instance of the object then set the name by just using: $object->name = "x"; However, I was told this was not best practice? That I should have a function set_name()… >>> More
Good place to look for example Database Designs - Best practices

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have been given the task to design a database to store a lot of information for our company. Because the task is rather big and contains multiple modules where users should be able to do stuff, I'm worried about designing a good data model for this. I just don't want to end up with a badly designed… >>> More
Notification Email Best Practices--From Server Setup to Programming

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
All, I'm in the process now of building a SaaS tool that allows network admins to generate notification emails to the members of the end-users of our platform (among many many other things). I'm running into a bit of an "out of my expertise" wall, as I know there are a lot of variables involved… >>> More

Related posts about parsing

Hot to fix nautilus desktop on linux mint

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
so I'm using Linux Mint 13 with Cinnamon and suddenly there are no icons on the desktop and the right click doesn't work, it's like the desktop doesn't start up at all, but the Cinnamon interface and everything else are working just fine. This happens only when I open the session with Cinnamon, if… >>> More
Is parsing JSON faster than parsing XML

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm creating a sophisticated JavaScript library for working with my company's server side framework. The server side framework encodes its data to a simple XML format. There's no fancy namespacing or anything like that. Ideally I'd like to parse all of the data in the browser as JSON. However, if… >>> More
Looking for a tutorial on Recursive Descent Parsing.

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am trying to parse some data to no success. Can anyone recommend a good introduction with a lot of examples to Recursive Descent Parsing? I haven't been able to find any. >>> More
Parsing XML with Hpricot, a Gem of a Ruby Gem

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
Need to parse complex XML documents but don't know where to begin? Leave the task to Ruby's powerful Hpricot library. >>> More
Parsing scripts that use curly braces

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
To get an idea of what I'm doing, I am writing a python parser that will parse directx .x text files. The problem I have deals with how the files are formatted. Although I'm writing it in python, I'm looking for general algorithms for dealing with this sort of parsing. .x files define data using… >>> More