Writing a Parser (for a markup language): Theory & Practice

Question

I'd like to write an idiomatic parser for a markup language like Markdown. My version will be slightly different, but I perceive at least a minor need for something like this in Clojure, and I'd like to get on it.

I don't want to use a mess of RegExes (though I realize some will probably be needed), and I'd like to make something both powerful and in idiomatic Clojure.

I've begun a few different attempts (mostly on paper), but I'm terribly happy with them, as I feel as though I'm just improvising. That would be fine, but I've done plenty of exploring in the language of Clojure in the past month or two, and would like to, at least in part, follow in the paths of giants.

I'd like some pointers, or suggestions, or resources (books from O'Reilly would be awesome–love me some eBooks–but Amazon or wherever would be great, too). Whatever you can offer.

EDIT Brian Carper has an interesting post on using ANTLR from Clojure.

There's also clojure-pg and fnparse, which are Clojure parser-generators. fnparse even looks like it's got some decent documentation.

Still looking for resources etc! Just thought I'd update these with some findings of my own.

Answer 1

Best I can think of is that Terrence Parr - the guy that leads the ANTLR parser generator - has written a markup language documented here. Anyway, there's source code there to look at.