[Caml-list] a few lexing questions

[Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@polytechnique.org>]

Hi,

I am writing a parser / pretty-printer for the iCalendar file format,
and I have a few questions.

First of all, there are some times when I need to differentiate lexing
according to the first letter of what I am lexing. As I want to reuse
the lexing code, I did the following:

and alt_lang_xparam = parse
| 'A'                    { lexbuf.Lexing.lex_curr_pos <- Lexing.lexeme_start lexbuf;
                           Altrepparam (altrepparam lexbuf) }
| 'X'                    { lexbuf.Lexing.lex_curr_pos <- Lexing.lexeme_start lexbuf;
                           Xparam (xparam lexbuf) }
| 'L'                    { lexbuf.Lexing.lex_curr_pos <- Lexing.lexeme_start lexbuf;
                           Langparam (languageparam lexbuf) }

Is it buggy ? Bad style ? Is there a nicer way to do it ?

A second question is about integration this code with other lexing code
or streams. An iCalendar file cannot have a line that is longer than 75
bytes, excluding line break. A line may be broken anywhere as long as
there is a space at the beginning of the next line, as in:

this is a very lo
 ng line

represents "this is a very long line". As this break may occur anywhere
(even inside keywords), I assume when writing the lexer these kind of
lines have been already merged together. I know how to implement the
merging using a temp file, but I'm looking for a nicer solution (like
using a stream, or using one lexer to feed the current lexer). Any
suggestion ?

I'd also like to have some advice on doing the symmetric transformation
(breaking long lines when necessary) ... Would streams be a good
solution here ?

Thanks a lot,

Alan Schmitt

-- 
The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.

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