Newbie question: Scanners?

[AndrewO]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for the response.   I think I understand the part about
backtracking, but I guess I'm still wondering about the first part.
It might help if I describe my situation a little more: I'm trying to
write something to parse the output from the traceroute utility more
quickly than a standard regex based solution written in Perl or Ruby.
The thing that's tripped me up in the past is that there's some
possible ambiguity which I think would have to be solved with
backtracking.  For example, you can have lines like the following:

6 sl-bb24-pen-15-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.16.81)  113.927 ms  110.118
ms  109.133 ms

5 195.3.70.65 (195.3.70.65)  17.557 ms  10.957 ms  11.692 ms

7  61.19.60.22 (61.19.60.22)  2.708 ms 202.129.63.70 (202.129.63.70)
2.751 ms *

Hostnames are easy to extract.  Where is gets complicated is on the
last line.  It can't be known that 202.129.63.70 is an IP address and
not a delay until the second period.

So does this situation fit into criteria of being able to be "broken
down into a list of items taken from a pool of possibilities"?

Sorry if this is a little remedial and thanks for the help.

-Andrew

On May 11, 3:49 pm, Adrian Thurston <thurs... at cs.queensu.ca> wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> Scanners are suitable for processing streams of tokens. Generally this
> is any input that can be broken down into a list of items taken from a
> pool of possibilities.
>
> You can also use a scanner for its backtracking features. They are
> useful in cases where you want to attempt one pattern and should that
> fail you would like to match some other pattern against a shorter string.
>
> Regards,
>  Adrian
>
> AndrewO wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> > I'm pretty new to FSMs, so this is probably an obvious question: when
> > would you use a scanner over a standard machine?  Is it just for being
> > able to backtrack if you're going to have ambiguity?  Or is it deeper
> > than that?
>
> > Sorry if this has been covered elsewere.
>
> > Thanks,
> > Andrew O'Brien
>
> > >
>
>
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