[Biojava-l] RegEx

Thomas Down td2@sanger.ac.uk
Tue, 12 Dec 2000 10:22:51 +0000


On Mon, Dec 11, 2000 at 05:21:27PM -0800, Emig, Robin wrote:
> 	I want to be able to use regular expressions in developing parsers.
> Unfortunately, this requires something like the oroperl, perltools, or
> stevesofts.regex libraries. this of course means that if we added these
> parsers to biojava, these would have to follow along. However, it might
> speed the development of parsers for biojava. What are you thoughts.

Which formats are you interested in parsing?  I know regexps
are convenient, but it's amazing what can be done with a few
StringTokenizers...

I don't have any problem as such with using a regexp-based parser,
but depending how specialized it is, it might make more sense to
have these parsers in a separate CVS module, to keep the dependancy
out of BioJava.

If you do want to go ahead and use regexps, it makes sense
to use a parser under a licence which plays well with the LGPL
on the BioJava core code.  Either of the two regexp packages
available from jakarta.apache.org (ORO, or a simpler one) should
be okay here.

Thomas.
-- 
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