August 2003
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
15h 3m
English
Content preview from Using XML with Legacy Business Applications
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Grammar Analysis and Description
The grammar of our legacy file formats can be broken down into two separate grammars: (1) the grammar of records and groups of records within the file, and (2) the grammar of the fields within a record. In the case of CSV files, we have imposed the restriction that each row has the same format. The CSV file grammar can be expressed rather simply with the following BNF production.
CSV File Grammar
CSVFile ::= row+ |
The plus sign (+) indicates one or more. So, this simply says that a CSV file contains one or more rows. For CSV files, the row grammar is the interesting part. Remember, here we don't want to describe the grammar of a specific CSV file; instead we want to abstract the essential features of CSV files ...