Parboiled is a modern. lightweight and easy to use library to parse expression grammars in Java or Scala and in my humble opinion it is perfect for use cases where you need something between regular expressions and a complex parser generator like ANTLR.

In the following tutorial we’re going to create a simple grammar to specify a task list and write an implementation of a parser also as unit tests for each grammar rule in Java.

Additionally, we’re using the Scala variant of Parboiled to build up an Abstract Syntax Tree parser and analyze a given task list with it.

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