I'm trying to understand how documentation generators like Doxygen, JavaDocs etc. work. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not asking how to use them, but how they do it. I tried to find information about the topic but only found 1 article which is really old, so I'm kinda frustrated.
Does someone know any articles or literature about this?
For doxygen there is a manual page about the internals of Doxygen.
Some small document generators just use regular expressions to extract the documentation. The more flexible and complicated way is to develop a parser for the language and a parser for the documentation syntax just like doxygen and Javadoc do.