Variant: State Machine (SM), Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)
Source: cfg2kv.js, package.json
As the direct output generation usually is not recommended (it works just for the cases where the output ordering directly follows the input ordering) one usually always wants to use an intermediate format, a so called Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). This way two passes are performed: parsing of the input syntax into the AST and then querying the AST to produce the output. For our trivial configuration language this looks like overhead, but for mostly all parsing approaches this is the recommended way. Additionally, some too much bare metal coding can be replaced with at least a little bit of Regular Expressions again. This uses my ASTy and ASTq as external libraries.
RECOMMENDATION: Avoid this approach at all as it is also too low-level and leads to too much boilerplate code.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| still rather much code | still partly hard to understand |
| very flexible in output generation | external dependencies |
| hard to implement error reporting
| hard to track line/column