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Section 15.5 Parsing input

In Section 1.5 I defined “parsing” as the process of analyzing the structure of a sentence in a natural language or a statement in a formal language. For example, the compiler has to parse your program before it can translate it into machine language.
In addition, when you read input from a file or from the keyboard you often have to parse it in order to extract the information you want and detect errors.
For example, I have a file called distances that contains information about the distances between major cities in the United States. I got this information from a randomly-chosen web page
 1 
http://www.jaring.my/usiskl/usa/distance.html
so it may be wildly inaccurate, but that doesn’t matter. The format of the file looks like this: 
"Atlanta"       "Chicago"       700
"Atlanta"       "Boston"        1,100
"Atlanta"       "Chicago"       700
"Atlanta"       "Dallas"        800
"Atlanta"       "Denver"        1,450
"Atlanta"       "Detroit"       750
"Atlanta"       "Orlando"       400
Each line of the file contains the names of two cities in quotation marks and the distance between them in miles. The quotation marks are useful because they make it easy to deal with names that have more than one word, like “San Francisco.”
By searching for the quotation marks in a line of input, we can find the beginning and end of each city name. Searching for special characters like quotation marks can be a little awkward, though, because the quotation mark is a special character in C++, used to identify string values.
If we want to find the first appearance of a quotation mark, we have to write something like: 
int index = line.find('\"');
The argument here looks like a mess, but it represents a single character, a double quotation mark. The outermost single-quotes indicate that this is a character value, as usual. The backslash (\) indicates that we want to treat the next character literally. The sequence \" represents a quotation mark; the sequence \' represents a single-quote. Interestingly, the sequence \\ represents a single backslash. The first backslash indicates that we should take the second backslash seriously.
Parsing input lines consists of finding the beginning and end of each city name and using the substr function to extract the cities and distance. substr is a string member function; it takes two arguments, the starting index of the substring and the length. 
void processLine(const string& line)
{
  // the character we are looking for is a quotation mark
  char quote = '\"';

  // store the indices of the quotation marks in a vector
  vector<int> quoteIndex (4);

  // find the first quotation mark using the built-in find
  quoteIndex[0] = line.find(quote);

  // find the other quotation marks using the find from Chapter 7
  for (int i=1; i < 4; i++) {
    quoteIndex[i] = find(line, quote, quoteIndex[i-1]+1);
  }

  // break the line up into substrings
  int len1 = quoteIndex[1] - quoteIndex[0] - 1;
  string city1 = line.substr(quoteIndex[0]+1, len1);
  int len2 = quoteIndex[3] - quoteIndex[2] - 1;
  string city2 = line.substr(quoteIndex[2]+1, len2);
  int len3 = line.length() - quoteIndex[2] - 1;
  string distString = line.substr(quoteIndex[3]+1, len3);

  // output the extracted information
  cout << city1 << "\t" << city2 << "\t" << distString << endl;
}
Of course, just displaying the extracted information is not exactly what we want, but it is a good starting place.

Checkpoint 15.5.1.

What does parsing mean in the programming sense?
  • to scan an entire program for errors
  • Incorrect! This is included in the debugging process.
  • to run a program start to finish and record the run time
  • Incorrect! This is included in the debugging process.
  • to analyze the structure of a statement in a formal language
  • Correct! The compiler has to parse the program before it can translate it into machine language!
  • to search an entire program for a statement
  • Incorrect! You can use control (command) + F to find a particular statement.

Checkpoint 15.5.2.

Checkpoint 15.5.3.

Checkpoint 15.5.4.

Create a block of code that takes a date written in the format “mm/dd/yyyyy” as an argument, and that separates it into three separate integers: day, month, and year. Find the respective parts in this order: month, first slash, day, second slash, year.
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