I have a file containing a text representation of an object. I have written a combinator parser grammar that parses the text and returns the object. In the text, "#" is a comment delimiter: everything from that character to the end of the line is ignored. Blank lines are also ignored. I want to process text one line at a time, so that I can handle very large files.
I don't want to clutter up my parser grammar with generic comment and blank line logic. I'd like to remove these as a preprocessing step. Converting the file to an iterator over line I can do something like this:
Source.fromFile("file.txt").getLines.map(_.replaceAll("#.*", "").trim).filter(!_.isEmpty)
How can I pass the output of an expression like that into a combinator parser? I can't figure out how to create a Reader object out of a filtered expression like this. The Java FileReader interface doesn't work that way.
Is there a way to do this, or should I put my comment and blank line logic in the parser grammar? If the latter, is there some util.parsing package that already does this for me?
The simplest way to do this is to use the fromLines method on PagedSeq:
import scala.collection.immutable.PagedSeq
import scala.io.Source
import scala.util.parsing.input.PagedSeqReader
val lines = Source.fromFile("file.txt").getLines.map(
_.replaceAll("#.*", "").trim
).filterNot(_.isEmpty)
val reader = new PagedSeqReader(PagedSeq.fromLines(lines))
And now you've got a scala.util.parsing.input.Reader that you can plug into your parser. This is essentially what happens when you parse a java.io.Reader, anyway—it immediately gets wrapped in a PagedSeqReader.