Parsing via Regular Expressions

Abstract

Since programming languages exist, parsing the code - primarily for compilation - is an ever-present necessity. As of today, there is a deep theory of this topic, describing approaches and useful constructs, categories and capabilities of parsers, which this paper not intends to dive into deeply, but to describe and use the official technical terms where possible. The presented approach of parsing utilizes regular expressions and forms a PEG (Parsing Expression Grammar), which is more expressive than simply regular expressions [1]. This paper aims to present an approach specially for parsing complex input recursively using PEG approach. An easy to configure and understand interpreter based on regular expressions over characters, tokens and schemas is outlined.