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documentationjavadocdoxygendocumentation-generation

How do documentation generators work?


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?


Solution

  • 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.