Perl, one of the world's most widely used programming languages, was born out of the need to resolve the creator's dissatisfaction with what were, at the time, standard data parsing solutions. Indeed, since the 1.0 release in 1987, Perl has been heralded for its powerful parsing capabilities-features that are further enhanced through the thousands of Perl extensions available at the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).

Pro Perl Parsing begins with several chapters devoted to key parsing principles; these chapters discuss topics pertinent to regular expressions, parsing grammars, and parsing techniques. This material sets the stage for later chapters, which introduce numerous powerful CPAN parsing modules and provide an ample number of example applications. This book couples an introduction to data parsing concepts and techniques with practical instruction regarding key Perl modules that are capable of facilitating complex parsing tasks. For example, the World Wide Web poses a huge problem for parsers, so the material on obtaining and parsing information from HTML and XML is extensive.

After reading this book, you should take away a thorough understanding of Perl parsing techniques and how to apply them in your situation. With this knowledge, you will be able to implement parsing effectively and efficiently, with a minimum of fuss.

• About the Author
• About the Technical Reviewer
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Parsing and Regular Expression Basics
• Grammars
• Parsing Basics
• Using Parse::Yapp
• Performing Recursive-Descent Parsing with Parse::RecDescent
• Accessing Web Data with HTML::TreeBuilder
• Parsing XML Documents with
• XMLlibXML and XML::SAX
• Introducing Miscellaneous Parsing Modules
• Finding Solutions to Miscellaneous Parsing Problems. Performing Text and Data Mining
• Index