What do people do with Parsers, like antlr javacc?

Question

Out of curiosity, I wonder what can people do with parsers, how they are applied, and what do people usually create with it?

I know it's widely used in programming language industry, however I think this is just a tiny portion of it, right?

Answer 1

Besides special-purpose languages, my most ambitious use of a parser generator yet (with good old yacc back in C, and again later with pyparsing in Python) was to extract, validate and possibly alter certain meta-info from SQL queries -- parsing SQL properly is a real challenge (especially if you hope to support more than one dialect!-), a parser generator (and a lexer it sits on top of) at least remove THAT part of the job!-)

Answer 2

They are used to parse text....

To give a more concrete example, where I work we use lexx/yacc to parse strings coming over sockets.

Also from the name it should give you an idea what javacc is used for (java compiler compiler!)