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• Technology
• System Requirements
• Pricing

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ClearParseTM 1.0 Open Edition

ClearParse Open Edition makes your product robust by using proven parsing techniques and providing error recovery capability. It's a flexible engine that can be used for any parsing task including interpreting or compiling programming languages, analyzing or converting data files, processing command line parameters and user input, implementing markup languages and scripts, natural language processing (NLP), and more. Weighing in at only about 70 KB, there's no reason not to take advantage of ClearParse Open Edition's streamlined code to enable your application to do more faster and with less overhead.

Can commercial products use ClearParse Open Edition?

A product can use ClearParse Open Edition only if it is an open source product that is licensed under the GNU General Public License. In other words, it must be free software. If your product is not open source, then you need ClearParse Standard or ClearParse Professional.

Features and benefits

• GNU General Public License
  Open Source developers can add the power of ClearParse Open Edition to their GPL licensed projects for free. The GPL insures that ClearParse Open Edition and the products that use it stay free.
• Dynamic grammar handling
  Saves development time and makes your product more flexible because there's no need to rebuild your application or recompile generated parser code whenever your grammar or parsing task changes. The engine doesn't have to change; you just load a new grammar. Grammars can also be dynamically linked, downloaded from the Internet at run time, or completely created on the fly at run time.
• Modular grammars
  Faster grammar development by reusing grammar code and combining existing grammars.
• Descriptive grammar specification language
  No need to understand and decypher cryptic grammar definition notation. Unlike mathematical notations, the Grammar Definition Markup Language (GDML) uses descriptive tags similar to HTML/XML that are easy to remember, understand, and read.
• Intelligent error recovery
  Have full control over the processing of files and easily design grammars that recover from error situations.
• Parse many sources simultaneously
  Take advantage of multi-tasking for large parsing tasks that involved many files.
• Platform-independent implementation
  Although ClearParse is compiled for a particular platform, it's written so that it can be easily ported to other platforms to fit your needs.

Technology

ClearParse Open Edition is an efficient, GPL-licensed, general-purpose, top-down parsing engine with practically unlimited backtracking capability. Since ClearParse Open Edition is an engine rather than a code generator, you simply load your grammar into it and make calls to the engine from your application to produce a parsing tree for the source material.

Unlike many other parsers, ClearParse Open Edition doesn't require that its grammar be LL(1) compliant and you don't have to make left-factoring adjustments. However, because it is a top-down parser, ClearParse Open Edition doesn't support left recursions. Instead, ClearParse Open Edition can find and warn you of both immediate and hidden left recursions in your grammar.

With the ClearParse Open Edition engine you can also process multiple sources simultaneously, monitor, control and debug the parser's progress with callback functions, define your own error recovery rules directly in the grammar, and much more.

System requirements

• For Windows 95, NT or higher: To use the DLLs requires an ANSI-compliant C/C++ or any other programming language that can call standard Windows DLL functions. To use the project files included with the sample applications, or compile the ClearParse Open Edition source requires Visual C++ 5 or higher.
• For other platforms: ANSI-compliant C++ compiler such as the GNU C++ compiler.

Pricing

ClearParse Open Edition is licensed under the GNU General Public License. As a result, it is free for use in and for distribution with projects that are licensed under the GPL.

If your product is not licensed under the GPL, you can purchase the Standard or Professional versions of ClearParse. These versions are dual-licensed and can be used with closed, commercial products.

Download ClearParse Open Edition

The ClearParse Open Edition binaries and source files are available at the ClearParse Open Edition project page.