I’ve been working feverishly to develop leex and yecc grammar files to parse IMAP command and responses and it’s going wonderfully.
I’ve anaged to get through all of the commands that I had previously parsed by hand and then got to the FETCH command … again …
This time the parsing of the syntax has been a dream and I finally understand how to read the BNF in the back of the IMAP RFC.
I’ve also developed a new appreciation for the IMAP protocol. I use think that the protocol was oddly obscure and formatted simply to make it difficult to parse, but now I understand that IMAP was developed around it’s BNF. Which when you are using yacc/yecc to create a grammar file for it make it a wonderful protocol to work with.
I recently had to go back into my leex file and add some code to pre-process the fetch command. Basically I found a regular expression and then added some double quotes in the appropriate places to Ame the fetch command look more like strings then individual tokens. It works great and now I can get back to the yecc grammar file.
After that pre-processing sidetrak the rest of translating the BNF into the yecc grammar file should be a breeze, now I just wish I had the time to finish it tonight 