[comp.lang.perl] Parsing Frame MIF with perl

david@indetech.com (David Kuder x2003) (03/01/91)

I have written a couple of little ad-hoc filters that process
the output of a FrameMaker document in MIF (Maker Interchange
Format).  However, before writing the third one I was wondering
if anyone had written a "MIF parser" of some sort.

MIF looks like <Tag Body> where Body can be another tagged
thing or a list of strings.  Frame's convention for writting
this is to put any <> that has a Body that is a <> with just
the tag on the line:
	<T1
		<Foo "bar" 1.0 bog>
		<Fang>
		<www "biddle">
	> #End T1
(# to EOL is comment).

The last two time I needed to parse stuff I could get away with
line at a time parsing with minimal state saved.  Now I need to have 
a lot of state and multiline bits to pull apart.

So has anyone done this already?  If not, does anyone see a natural
mapping from the <Tag <tag body>> form to a Perl data structure?
-- 
David A. Kuder              Looking for enough time to get past patchlevel 1
415 438-2003  david@indetech.com  {uunet,sun,sharkey,pacbell}!indetech!david