I do mean the ??? in the title because I’m not exactly sure. Let me explain the situation.
I’m not a computer science student & I never did any compilers course. Till now I used to think that compiler writers or students who did compilers course are outstanding because they had to write Parser component of the compiler in whatever language they are writing the compiler. It’s not an easy job right?
I’m dealing with Information Retrieval problem. My desired programming language is Python.
Parser Nature:
http://ir.iit.edu/~dagr/frDocs/fr940104.0.txt is the sample corpus. This file contains around 50 documents with some XML style markup. (You can see it in above link). I need to note down other some other values like <DOCNO> FR940104-2-00001 </DOCNO> & <PARENT> FR940104-2-00001 </PARENT> and I only need to index the <TEXT> </TEXT> portion of document which contains some varying tags which I need to strip down and a lot of <!-- --> comments that are to be neglected and some &hyph; &space; & character entities. I don’t know why corpus has things like this when its know that it’s neither meant to be rendered by browser nor a proper XML document.
I thought of using any Python XML parser and extract desired text. But after little searching I found JavaCC parser source code (Parser.jj) for the same corpus I’m using here. A quick look up on JavaCC followed by Compiler-compiler revealed that after all compiler writers aren’t as great as I thought. They use Compiler-compiler to generate parser code in desired language. Wiki says input to compiler-compiler is input is a grammar (usually in BNF). This is where I’m lost.
- Is Parser.jj the grammar (Input to compiler-compiler called JavaCC)? It’s definitely not BNF. What is this grammar called? Why is this grammar has Java language? Isn’t there any universal grammar language?
- I want python parser for parsing the corpus. Is there any way I can translate Parser.jj to get python equivalent? If yes, what is it? If no, what are my other options?
- By any chance does any one know what is this corpus? Where is its original source? I would like to see some description for it. It is distributed on internet with name
frDocs.tar.gz
Why do you call this “XML-style” markup? – this looks like pretty standard/basic XML to me.
Try elementTree or lxml. Instead of writing a parser, use one of the stable, well-hardened libraries that are already out there.