Perl Training Australia - Advanced Parsing with Parse::RecDescent

Trainer:	Damian Conway
Length:	1 day
Target Audience:	Perl programmers who are already familiar with the basics of grammar-based parsing. The techniques presented are not restricted to the specific applications mentioned, and will be useful to anyone who needs to process complex structured input of any kind.

This tutorial will show you how to use a range of standard Perl features and several CPAN modules (in particular, Parse::RecDescent) to decipher and process a variety of complex data and command formats. It examines some of the more advanced features of the Parse::RecDescent module and explores the powerful parsing techniques those features support.

You will learn:

how to design and build self-modifying parsers to process Apache configuration files and log data;
how to pull pesky unmatched <P> tags from HTML;
how to deal with ambiguous data by parsing it in multiple universes simultaneously;
how to get Parse::RecDescent to write most of your grammar for you;
how to parse modular text (e.g. with source with #includes in it);
how to pre-filter your source code by tricking Perl into (nearly) parsing Perl;
how to debug Parse::RecDescent parsers efficiently and how to improve the efficiency of your Parse::RecDescent grammars;