Higher-Order Perl

CHAPTER 8 PARSING

Parsing is the process of converting an unstructured input, such as a text file, into a data structure. Almost every program that reads input must perform parsing of some type. Long ago when I started writing this book, I was amazed to discover how underappreciated parsing processes are. One editor even worried that parsing might not be a useful application of Perl. But parsing is nearly universal, because almost every program must read an unstructured input, such as a text file, and turn it into a data structure, so that it can do some processing on it.

Programmers have become adept at designing data formats so that parsing is as simple as possible, and they may be unaware that they are doing it. But even Perl’s <HANDLE> operator ...