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Download Parsers 1.0b1
http://www.getsprouted-mirror.com/downloads/Parsers1.0b.zip
[[ Mac OS 10.5 Leopard only ]]

Screenshot

Alright, I’m pretty excited about this! In my free time I’ve been working on another small application, Parsers. I believe it’s finally ready for open beta testing.

Parses is “drag and drop text parsing and data mining”. The app is designed to help you preprocesses data so that you’re left with only the information you need in a format you can easily apply elswhere. In a visual environment you create and test re-usable, rules based documents for parsing well formatted text.

For example, let’s say you want to download your local weather information from an online feed. The temperature, conditions and forecast change by the hour but the html in which that information is contained otherwise stays the same. That is, the relevant information or variables change but the format remains constant. Parsers helps you extract the temperature, conditions and forecast from the feed so that you can use the information elsewhere, in a widget, your own webpage or a spreadsheet for example.

Parsers is a utility application targeted at a specific class of users. While it won’t be for everyone, those who do integrate Parsers into their workflow may find that it saves hours of work.

The application should be straightforward. Try one of the tutorials and you’ll understand immediately what the application does.

Featurewise Parsers sports an Apple Script interface, bulk file processing and support for regular expressions. It can read text, rich text, Word and PDF documents and output XML or native property lists. Error checking occurs at every step. When something goes wrong you should be informed in a helpful manner.

This is flat out some of the best code I’ve ever written, and unlike Cork (which I posted as an R&D project a while back), Parsers is pretty much finished. There are some finishing touches to take care of and the need for a thorough testing, but once that’s done I fully intend to release the application.

Feel free to check it out. Feedback is appreciated!

[[ Crossposted to the Journler beta testing forum ]]