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RE: parser validation tools

  • Subject: RE: parser validation tools
  • From: "Bollinger, John Clayton" <jobollin@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 16:48:14 +0100 (BST)

Richard Ball wrote:
> Ideally what I would ask of the lexical analysis routine 
> would be for it to
> return an array of all the datanames in the CIF tagged with a 
> loop indicater
> (0 for non-looped, otherwise a number for which loop that 
> dataname was in), a
> second array for all the non-looped dataitems, a third array 
> containing all
> the looped dataitems (with an id for which loop they came 
> from so I know
> which datanames go with these dataitems). No other 
> processing, no other
> validation. Given those three arrays my existing routines 
> would handle all
> the other processing needed. Is that something your prototype 
> could do?

It could be made to do that without a great deal of difficulty.
I observe, however, that digesting a CIF in the way you describe
would make it very difficult for your program to pinpoint some
kinds of syntactic errors, e.g. a non-looped data tag without
an associated value.  You could easily tell that there was
an error, but not where it occurred.  If you still want something
like this then I can provide it (but see also below).

Partially as a test of various things lexly and yaccly, I bit the
bullet and went ahead to build a syntax-checking CIF pretty printer.
The pretty printing end of it produces output much along the lines
that Richard outlined earlier.  I will release the code to anyone
interested, with the understanding that it is still under development.
It does not validate against a dictionary, but it would be downright
easy to provide a hook for an appropriate routine to do that.


Regards,

John Bollinger
Indiana University
Molecular Structure Center

jobollin@indiana.edu

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