On Jul 11, 2011, at 5:17 PM, Brion Vibber wrote: Nor are we going straight to HTML, which is one reason we didn't steal this stuff. :-) _______________________________________________ Wikitext-l mailing list Wikitext-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l

I'm surprised, Neil, that you think Ward was disappointed with this as he was always supportive of our efforts and indeed introduced us to Peg and spent some time helping us get into writing grammars and understanding the pitfalls. I'm sorry it doesn't solve the problem you guys have off the shelf, but hopefully it helps open some doors, or at least serves as a model of how a grammar can be written. If I can be of help, please just give me a shout. Cheers, Karl On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 4:35 AM, Neil Kandalgaonkar &lt;neilk(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:neilk@wikimedia.org>> wrote: Trevor & I talked with him extensively about this. BTW, around here, he's just Ward. :) He too was disappointed that his team wrote rules to directly transform wikitext into HTML. The parse-everything-in-Wikipedia thing isn't quite what it sounds like. If I recall correctly it works like this: As part of his job at About.us, he was really looking for patterns of Wikitext that he could use to snag business information. One target was the Infobox on Wikipedia. So, the tool was a way of cataloging the various ways that people structure an Infobox template. Because he wrote this in C, he added rules to the grammar to discard information in favor of keeping a data structure of constant size. That's mostly what the the <<< >>> in the grammar mean. Anyway, this then serves as a sampling of the majority of the structures one is interested in. The more rules you write, the more "unknown" stuff falls into the fixed size of structures that are unparsed. IIRC he agreed it might not be so useful if you were writing a grammar for PHP or JS (I assume the same is true for Python). On 7/11/11 5:24 PM, Erik Rose wrote: structure rather than going straight to HTML output, so things won't be an exact match (especially where we do template stuff). steal this stuff. :-) -- Neil Kandalgaonkar |) &lt;neilk(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:neilk@wikimedia.org>> _______________________________________________ Wikitext-l mailing list Wikitext-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org <mailto:Wikitext-l@lists.wikimedia.org> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l _______________________________________________ Wikitext-l mailing list Wikitext-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l