Introducing Miscellaneous Parsing Modules

Summary

This chapter examined several different parsing modules that may be of occasional use to Perl programmers. The Text:: Balanced module is a highly useful module to consider when you encounter structures involving nested delimiters, since its balancing capability ensures that the extracted text lies between the appropriate opening and closing delimiters.

You saw how the diverse formats that time and date information can be stored in often presents a programming challenge, since writing a parser that can handle all of these different formats is a tedious task. Luckily, the Date::Parse module can handle these situations for you and extract the time and date information.

Another module examined, XML::RSS:Parser, enables you to take an RSS feed and extract items of interest from it, which is an ability that will likely grow in importance as RSS feeds increase in prominence. Finally, you examined the Math:: Expresssion parsing module, which can generate parse trees of mathematical equations.

The next chapter will draw on elements of parsing that have been covered throughout the book and will apply this parsing knowledge to a diverse range of parsing tasks. Chapter 9 will present a series of cookbook-style solutions that will benefit all Perl programmers.