In Python, the chemparse project is available as a “lightweight package for parsing chemical formula strings into python dictionaries” mapping chemical elements to numeric counts. It supports parsing several variants of formula such as: simple formulas like “H2O” fractional stoichiometry … Read more
Historically I have worked on many projects related to high-performance Protobuf, be that on the C++ runtime, on the Rust runtime, or on integrating UPB, the fastest Protobuf runtime, written by my colleague Josh Haberman. I generally don’t post directly … Read more
JSON is not a friendly format to the Unix shell — it’s hierarchical, and cannot be reasonably split on any character (other than the newline, which is not very useful) as that character might be included in a string. There … Read more
Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. … Read more
Here’s the thing about PDFs – they’re complex beasts that require quite a bit of thinking to properly parse – they come in all shapes and sizes, and they can contain a lot of different types of data and formatting. … Read more
Background A while ago, I managed to rip the level data and graphics from the c64 version of Bubble Bobble. All 100 levels from the c64 version of Bubble Bobble. I wrote a tool in typescript that reads the data … Read more
When pairing with my friend Emily, we had a choice of what to implement in her project: start a new feature, or add a command line argument parser? We opted for the latter, because it had to happen eventually and … Read more
What is the grammar and meaning of awk code? Maybe a yacc expert could know. If you only know what the Awk book (by A, K, & W, 1st or 2nd Ed.) says, you’d be missing some details. For example, … Read more
Abstract File formats specify how data is encoded for persistent storage. They cannot be formalized as context-free grammars since their specifications include context-sensitive patterns such as the random access pattern and the type-length-value pattern. We propose a new grammar mechanism … Read more
If you work with Protocol Buffers (protobuf), you can really save time, boredom, and headache by parsing your definitions to build tools and generate code. The usual tool for doing that is protoc. It supports plugins to generate output of … Read more