Full rewrite with a lexer/parser grammar

[virtualtam]

It would be more elegant and maintainable to describe the Netscape variants as a grammar, and generate/write a corresponding tokenizer/lexer/parser to process data.

Inspired by:

• https://tomassetti.me/parsing-in-java/
• https://tomassetti.me/parsing-in-python/

See:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_parser_generators
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8002617/php-lexer-and-parser-generator
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2093228/lex-and-yacc-in-php
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2245962/is-there-an-alternative-for-flex-bison-that-is-usable-on-8-bit-embedded-systems
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25049751/constructing-an-abstract-syntax-tree-with-a-list-of-tokens/25106688#25106688

[virtualtam]

I've started experimenting with Hoa\Compiler, which is a PHP library to define grammars and generate the corresponding tokenizer/lexer/parser:

Documentation:

• https://hoa-project.net/En/Literature/Hack/Compiler.html
• https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/2hrt8n/hoacompiler_manipulating_dsls_has_never_been/

Example grammars:

• https://github.com/hoaproject/Math/blob/master/Arithmetic.pp
• https://github.com/hoaproject/Json/blob/master/Grammar.pp
• https://github.com/hoaproject/Ruler/blob/master/Grammar.pp

[virtualtam]

Experiment code and notes can be found at https://github.com/virtualtam/hoa-netscape-bookmark-parser

[virtualtam]

Interesting use of the PHP DOMDocument API:

• https://secure.php.net/manual/en/class.domdocument.php
• https://github.com/nextcloud/bookmarks/blob/master/controller/lib/bookmarks.php#L615