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Pro Perl Parsing Review by Robin Twombly Application Developer
Experts guide to extracting the data you want!
Christopher M. Frenz has put together a real how to manual for those who use Perl for parsing.
Grabbing the data you want from a file can be tricky but Frenz has taken parsing from the top shelf
and placed it where any Perl programmer can use it.
The opening chapter is great for anyone who has had trouble understanding how to use the regular expressions
as built into Perl. He explains Pattern Matching, Quantifiers, and how not to be Greedy with your pattern matching.
However, the book goes far beyond the basics of regular expressions in Perl to various libraries which can be used
for parsing HTML, XML, RSS, and any text based file.
Chapter 2 of the book seems very heady as he discusses the use of Generative Grammars which is foundational
for anyone wanting to truly understand parsing. From Chomsky's grammar to Type 1, 2, and 3 grammars,
he details these structures and how to use them.
Perl modules GraphViz::Regex, Regexp::Common, Parse::Yapp, Parse::RecDescent, HTML::TreeBuilder,
XML::LibXML, XML::SAX, and XML::RSS are all discussed in this book and clear examples are given on how
you can use them to parse files to get the data you want.
In the end of the book is a section on Data Mining well worth the read dealing with Descriptive Modeling and
Predictive Modeling. For anyone doing data mining work from Web based data or from Relational Databases
this section can be very helpful.