Re: [Boost-users] Simple fast parsing

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Simple fast parsing
From: Joel de Guzman (joel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-21 18:49:35

Christopher Jefferson wrote:

> Looking at the documentation, Boost::Spirit seems like a very big hammer 
> to crack this quite small nut, and it is unclear to me how well it would 
> fit into an existing recursive decent parser. Has anyone ever used it as 
> such? Is there a simple alternative?

Spirit is well tuned for small parsing tasks like this. It is a
modular RD parser. What you need is what you pay for. The code is
as tight as it can be. Try the int parsing examples and see the
generated assembler. One of Spirit's original goal is for such
micro-parsing. You don't have to write an RD parser, Spirit
is an RD parser. However, if you need to use an existing RD
parser, then good! You can use any or all of Spirit facilities
as-is by calling Spirit's parse functions (which accept forward
iterators) from your RD environment. Or, the other way around,
you can write a custom-parser in spirit that calls your RD parser.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boostpro.com
http://spirit.sf.net