Network Programming with Rust

Parsing textual data

Data parsing is a problem closely related to that of deserialization. The most common way of thinking about parsing is to start with a formal grammar and construct parsers based on that. This results in a bottom-up parser where smaller rules parse smaller components of the whole input. A final combinatorial rule combines all smaller rules in a given order to form the final parser. This way of formally defining a finite set of rules is called a Parsing Expression Grammar (PEG). This ensures that parsing is unambiguous; that there is only one valid parse tree if parsing succeeds. In the Rust ecosystem, there are a few distinct ways of implementing PEGs, and each of those have their own strengths and weaknesses. The first ...