Writing a Parser Is Boring?

When inter­act­ing with dif­fer­ent ser­vices or pro­gram there often comes the point where some sort of file has to be parsed into a data struc­ture, which can be processed lat­er. For stan­dard file for­mats like XML or JSON parsers are avail­able for almost any lan­guage out there. (BTW I love the graph­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the JSON syn­tax on their website.)

There are how­ev­er sit­u­a­tions in which one has to deal with a pro­pri­etary file for­mat or with ven­dor-spe­cif­ic exten­sions to a stan­dard­ized for­mat. At this point a pars­er has to be writ­ten. It seems a bor­ing task, how­ev­er there are sev­er­al impor­tant aspects of pro­gram­ming which can be learned here.

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