Nail: A Practical Tool for Parsing and Generating Data Formats

Abstract

We present Nail, an interface generator that allows programmers to safely parse and generate protocols defined by a Parser-Expression based grammar. Nail uses a richer set of parser combinators that induce an internal representation, obviating the need to write semantic actions. Nail also provides solutions parsing common patterns such as length and offset fields within binary formats that are hard to process with existing parser generators.