Parsing and Parsers with Dave Beazley and Erik Rose

Summary

If you have ever found yourself frustrated by a complicated regular expression or wondered how you can build your own dialect of Python then you need a parser. Dave Beazley and Erik Rose talk about what parsers are, how some of them work, and what you can do with them in this episode.

Preface



• Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.


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Interview



• Introductions


• How did you get introduced to Python?


• Can you each start by talking a bit about your respective libraries and what problem you were trying to solve when they were first created?


• In what ways does a full-fledged parser differ from what a regular expression engine is capable of?


• What are some of the different high-level approaches to building a parser and when might you want to choose one over the others?


• I’m sure that when most people hear the term parsing they associate it with reading in a data interchange format such as JSON or CSV. What are some of the more interesting or broadly applicable uses of parsing that might not be as obvious?


• One term that kept coming up while I was doing research for this interview was “Grammars”. How would you explain that concept for someone who is unfamiliar with it?


• Once an input has been parsed, what does the resulting data look like and how would a developer interact with it to do something useful?


• For someone who wants to build their own domain specific language (DSL) what are some of the considerations that they should be aware of to create the grammar?


• What are some of the most interesting or innovative uses of parsers that you have seen?



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