From: Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@...>
Date: 2006-10-06T10:28:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Parsing files

On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 10:15:12AM +0900, barjunk wrote:
> I'm new to ruby and one of the first projects I am trying to tackle is
> parsing a file
> with this sort of format:
> 
> zone "localdomain" IN {
>        type master;
>        file "localdomain.zone";
>        allow-update { none; };
> };
> 
> or host devicename-1 {
>  hardware ethernet 00:10:51:61:74:FF;
>  fixed-address 192.168.0.15;
> }
> 
> 
> The basic issue I'm working to resolve is how can I treat these
> sections as "records".
> 
> I know I could read the entire file into memory, but I was looking to
> only deal with them
> on a record by record basis.
> 
> One thought was to read through the file and keep a hash of information
> about where the
> record starts and ends, then when I want to read a record, use that
> reference to get the
> data.
> 
> Has anyone done something similar to this that I can use to learn how
> to manage these
> types of file formats?
> 
> There won't be an issues with concurrent access at this point.
> 
> These formats are found when using dhcp, freeradius, and nagios.  I'm
> sure there are others.
> 
I would write a grammar and a recursive descent parser for files like
these. Someone is bound to reply with some crazy regexp that works, but
only they will ever understand it ;).
> Mike
>