Parsing for Fun & Profit

This month Ash Moran will be running a talk & workshop called Parsing for Fun & Profit. This is a new and improved version of the NWRUG talk from February this year.

Practical workshop! After an intro to parsing, we’ll break off into groups and have a go at writing a parser for JSON using Treetop.

## What’s the Deal?

Parsing is understanding computer languages and data formats. You don’t need a computer science background to write a parser, and they aren’t just useful for building complex tools like compilers and interpreters. Here are some simpler applications you might have seen:

• syntax highlighting
• calculating metrics (e.g. code complexity)
• minifying code (popular with JavaScript)

What will we see and do?

• A quick intro to parsing
• A quick intro to Treetop
• A demo of how to incrementally build up a simple parser
• WORKSHOP! We’ll work on a JSON parser
• A tour of a simple syntax highlighter for Ruby written in Treetop

What will you need?

If you can, please bring a laptop running Ruby 1.9.3 or 2.0.0, and Git. Don’t worry if you can’t, we’ll work in pairs or small teams on the night.

Experience of regular expressions will be a big help, but we’ll try to match people based on their regex-fu. Treetop grammars are a bit more complex than regular expressions, but not much.

About the Speaker

Ash Moran is a freelance software developer & agile coach based in Manchester, and owner of PatchSpace Ltd. He has been using Ruby for many years, and has yet to find another language that makes writing high quality software so much fun.

Where

With the help of epiGenesys, we’re at the Enterprise Zone this month.

Join our Google+ event to let us know you’re coming.

Someone will be around from 18.45 if you’re around and we’ll probably head out for a drink afterwards.