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DataParserAndAnalyzer

Nicholas Burns
May 13, 2009

Overview

My project parses a comma separated value (CSV) file into a scheme list and then into XML which is then passed into FLEX for the user to see. It is built to take a dynamic number of students and items per student without failing.

Screenshot

Concepts Demonstrated

• Recursion is used to allow the flexibility on the amount of data passed into the program
• Syntactic Sugar: Taking bits of code which are used the same in different places and binding them to simple functions with useful names
• List traversing and accumulation: Used primarily to parse and build other lists from input to output. Also used to grab specific information from the overall data

External Technology

In this project I have taken advantage of a few different external technologies:

• FLEX: This language is used for the visualization of the data that my scheme program outputs as XML.
• CSV Library: Parses the CSV file into a nested list of lists which I end up rewriting to an easier list
• XML Library: Used to interpret output and build XML from a specially formated list of symbols to values
• Scheme Web Servlet: Used to allow my front end to grab the XML data and post it to the user.

Innovation

The most innovative part of my project is how it will accept unknown amount of data and correctly parse it into a XML tree structure that is usable by my FLEX front end.

Technology Used Block Diagram

Attach:nb-block.png Δ

Additional Remarks

This project allowed me to explore the world of FLEX and scheme functions/syntactic sugar. I was able to have a great exercise in problem solving and data parsing