We recently came across Pegex and found it to be an interesting module for parsing text data. Instead of using regular expressions directly, the user can write a grammar for the data to be parsed. The data can be automatically converted to a native Perl object or, if the user desires, it's possible to use actions to handle the grammar while parsing using a Pegex::Receiver class.

Pegex uses the type of grammars called Parsing Expression Grammars (PEG), which is an unambiguous form of writing a grammar. Each parsed string will in effect have a single valid parse tree. Since Pegex conver…